


The Echoes

by quixxotique (crownlessliestheking)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Cannibalism, Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Gore, Loneliness, Lonely Desperate People in a Post-Apocalyptic Road, Starvation, Subjuggulators I guess, The Road AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-01
Packaged: 2019-01-27 07:22:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12576624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crownlessliestheking/pseuds/quixxotique
Summary: Dave recognizes him the minute he sees him, this boy stretched thin and long, hair and skin caked with grime and a pair of dark, pointed glasses perched on his face. Dave’s been walking for nearly six months, now, a route imperfect and only occasionally guided by an old and faded map he’d gotten from Lalonde when they’d parted ways.





	The Echoes

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Footsteps](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5861518) by [Plajus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Plajus/pseuds/Plajus). 



> On ages: Dirk is about 16, Dave 38.  
> Beta read by the lovely eighth_chiharu (found here: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eighth_chiharu/pseuds/eighth_chiharu since I cannot actually work out link embedding in this thing).  
> Uh, hope you like it, this is actually the longest thing I've written (and finished) to date. Apparently self-imposed deadlines and word quotas per day do work.

Dave recognizes him the minute he sees him, this boy stretched thin and long, hair and skin caked with grime and a pair of dark, pointed glasses perched on his face. Dave’s been walking for nearly six months, now, a route imperfect and only occasionally guided by an old and faded map he’d gotten from Lalonde when they’d parted ways. His shoes are worn and caked with dust and ash, his shades cracked, and the mask covering the lower half of his face is fashioned out of a torn strip of a sheet; he’s tired, with little to no idea of where he’s going other than south, where it’s warmer. He has a little food left over from the last time he’d gotten lucky enough to stumble upon something another had left behind, and new scars from the last time he’d been unlucky enough to stumble into an ambush set by one of the bloodcults.

Since then, he’s been careful, but since then, he hasn’t seen anyone. And now in the middle of this desolate place that used to be a forest, under grey skies and blackened branches that claw at the sky in an echo of their last plea, Dave sees a figure and a face he hasn’t in years. One that he’d resigned himself to only knowing by memory, yet another of the beloved, inglorious dead. Someone who’s better off forgotten, before grief wears him down more than it already has.

Except that’s not true, here. Because there’s no way it could be anyone else.

He can’t help it, the way he abandons all caution and practically runs forward, the frost on the ground crunching under his feet, his brother’s name a prayer on silent lips. Only to be met with a drawn sword and the blank stare of dark lenses, tense posture and the youth’s free hand shifting down to his belt to ghost gloved fingers over the gun that rests there. Dave stops, instantly.

There’s no recognition on that face, and it’s years older and he’s so _thin_ , gaunt cheekbones and skin stretched tight and wrists slender and delicate like the bones of a bird’s wing, when Dave used to collect skeletons long ago. But it’s still his brother, he’s sure. It has to be.

“Dirk?” he asks, still somehow certain that saying his name will make the boy remember him, elicit some sort of a reaction. There’s a note of pleading desperation in his voice that Dave would have been ashamed of in another life, as he repeats the name.

Nothing. No answer, not even a flicker of expression across that face. He doesn’t even lower the sword, and Dave feels something sour and heavy settle in his gut, prickle his eyes.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he tries again, holding his hands out in the universal gesture of good intentions. He knows that the boy registers it, and after a too-long moment in the half-light, he lowers the sword.

 _Don’t you remember me. What happened to you. How are you here_. Questions unspoken bubble to his lips, and stop there, dammed.

The boy ignores him now, or at least seems to, katana still gripped tight in the way that Dave had taught him when he was so much smaller. When he could barely wrap his chubby fingers around the hilt. His head turns, eyes flitting over the silence and ash as if checking for an ambush. He doesn’t say another word, only takes a step back, quiet against the frost and the slush of dead leaves and the remnants of earlier snow. Uncertain, Dave lingers for a moment, but as the boy slips out of sight and blurs into the trees beyond, he follows after him with hurried steps that are too-loud in the blanket of deathly quiet.

They make an odd couple, weaving in and out of the trees, and the turns and twists are near dizzying, but he can always see the boy just ahead of him. Waiting, he wants to hope. It’s easy to lose track of where they are, and he nearly freezes when he sees the bare outline of footprints in the muck, a warning rising in his throat and fear jolting through him before he realizes that it’s his own. That the boy is leading him on a circuitous route- a test. Making sure that Dave can’t lead anyone here, later.

My clever boy, he thinks, still with that automatic hint of pride as the boy slows, now clearly waiting. He stands before what looks like a crack in the rock face, a small divot that would go so easily overlooked, and nudges aside what turns out to be grey tarp, worn thin but near indistinguishable from the slate-grey stone beneath. Without another word, he slips inside. Dave follows, setting aside his own wariness- the boy is thin, underfed, and though he has a sword, it was Dave who taught him how to use it. Never mind that the thought of Dirk being like the rest of the dregs left is a repellent thought, one that makes him feel sick to his stomach. The thought of fighting him is worse.

But that niggling fear vanishes almost as soon as he enters the cave that the boy has made a home out of, though- and there is no doubt that it is a home. Clean, with threadbare blankets piled high, and a small fire pit with the dirt around it trampled solid from constant use. Two rows of small cans, clearly carefully rationed. A small bag, half full. A small first-aid kit, a spool of thick wire that’s been shaped. Two bottles of water. No bones, none of that horrible burnt-sour smell and the thickness of screams hanging in the air. Safe. Dave lets himself relax, just a little.

He watches the boy replace the tarp in a motion that screams of practice, then take a single sip of water. Disciplined. He still doesn’t speak, only settles down near the fire pit to start up a little blaze with some of the stock of kindling near it. The mask comes off, so he can blow gently on it; a mouth he remembers as pouting, shaping around carefully enunciated words, smiling on the rare occasion, now consists of lips chapped and pressed together in a severe line.

Dave doesn’t try to talk to him again, even as the day slips by into a long twilight, and a longer night.

\---

Dave wakes to an empty cave and the bare embers of a fire burning slowly in the corner. His head is pillowed on his own bag, he’s warmer than he has been in a long time. All the cans of food are gone, as is- well. Everything else.

He sits up instantly, panic arcing through him. The boy isn’t here- Dirk isn’t here. No. Nonono. He doesn’t dare to call out, would he even get an answer? He doesn’t know how long he’s been asleep, how much of a head start the boy’s had, or even where he is. Everything in his pack is intact, but. There’s nothing else.

(Did he even really see him? A different scenario could have easily played out: Dave, stumbling lost through the woods. Finding a cave, easily hidden. Stumbling in and lighting a fire for warmth. Falling asleep after eating something. No spectre of a child he’d once raised to haunt him.)

His hands shake, just a little.

Dave sits up, elects to skip a breakfast, and hurriedly re-packs his bag. The boy was here. Dirk was here, and he can find him again. He has to. Surely, he couldn’t have gotten far. He’s out of the cave in minutes, mask and shades on, his own sword belted at his side, shitty shattered blade that it is.

The woods outside are quiet, still. There aren’t any tracks other than his own from last night, half-imprints frozen in the night. Another flash of doubt. But the ground is hard, now. Dirk wouldn’t have left any sign. There is nothing here to follow, and loss settles in once more, comfortable and heavy in the hollow of his chest. A stone sinking to the bottom of a pond. A beast settling into its cave for the winter. Dave picks a direction and begins walking, still watching for any sign of the boy.

“Shit out of luck,” he mumbles to himself, fingers curling tight around the straps of his pack. “But you’ve still got all your shit, so you should count yourself lucky with that. Coulda turned out a lot worse. Still alive, not eaten, warm night’s sleep. Shit’s alright, but you gotta move on.”

He’d considered staying in the cave, waiting, but there’s no point to it. He’s almost out of food to begin with, and the idea of leaving his shit there, where anyone else could find it? It isn’t a risk that he or anyone else would take while alive. And if he did imagine seeing the boy- well. He’d have been waiting for nothing.

The walk is silent, as it often is, with Dave quietly mumbling to himself as a way to fill it. There’s no one else to speak to, after all, and the quiet is oppressive, a pressure stifling his mind and soul. Dave doesn’t like to think of Before very often, of how he’d made it big and it’d been the best day of his life, of how Dirk had finally stopped being so skinny, how they’d both had everything they ever could have wanted. The memories aren’t enough to sustain him, in the end, and well- he doesn’t like to think about how quick their relationship was to deteriorate, either. Some things are too painful to face.

He shrugs it off easily enough, shaking off the melancholy when he hears the familiar burble of running water. A find, then, and hopefully it would be fresh. Or at least clean enough when filtered through a rag. It’s grey and choked with ash, like the landscape and sky, but it’s running water, and it isn’t loud enough that he’d be entirely unable to hear someone else approaching.

A good place to stop, then. He fetches a clean cloth from his pack, crumpled tight and wrapped in a small sheet of plastic wrap, carefully hoarded, so as to keep it as clean as possible. Though it too is a dun grey, Dave has long since stopped caring, and he dips it carefully into the stream, soaking it before parting his lips to let the cleaner water drip slowly into his mouth. Not an elegant solution, to be sure, but he doesn’t want risk removing anything else from his pack.

And it’s with his mouth halfway open and tongue sticking out to catch the fat drops of water that he sees the boy again, across the stream and halfway up a tree, having scaled the blackened and brittle limbs. He nearly drops the cloth in his concern, that instinctual worry of a parent for their reckless child. His heart is just about in his throat as he watches the boy smear the charcoal of the branches onto a small parcel, and when he slides down, easy and nimble as if he’d done this a thousand times before, it looks just like another burnt knot in the tree.

Dave manages to breathe properly only when the boy has both feet firmly on the ground, but that lasts all of a single second- he turns, and stares at Dave with that same blank expression from earlier. The kind that Dave knows had settled on his own face so easily after years. The kind that he’s coming to realize that he’d taught Dirk, more so than he’d like to think. Hesitant, he raises a hand in greeting, and receives nothing in return. Not another wave, not even a nod. Only the turn of the boy’s back and the whisper of his footsteps against the ground as the boy begins walking once more, upstream. There’s nothing to do now, but follow.

The boy leads him to a small pond, where rocks have fallen to the stream and slowed the flow; it isn’t deep at all, Dave estimates that it’d come up to his waist, at most.

“Is this some kinda passive-aggressive hint that I gotta shower or I smell or something?” Dave breaks the quiet to ask, kneeling to dip his fingers into the water. It’s bracingly cold, but tempting nonetheless. He hasn’t had the time nor the opportunity to clean himself off in months, and unappealing as the frigid water here might be, it’s not a chance he wants to waste. He looks at Dirk for a moment, considering. No wonder the boy seemed cleaner than anyone else he’d been unlucky enough to meet, he must come here often. Kid’s always liked his showers, he muses absently.

His words don’t get another reaction, and the boy continues to ignore him, giving no indication that he’d heard. It grates on Dave’s nerves.

“Right, well, I’m not getting naked with you staring me down like some kind of creep, ready to pounce on this premium slice of manflesh,” he continues, hesitantly setting his own pack down. They’re on opposite ends of the pond, after all, and he’s reasonably sure that he can reach it before the boy does. If he were inclined to steal. Which he doesn’t seem to be.

The boy is kneeling, now, one of the huge containers of water in hand, and he’s using a smaller flask and a fine, wire mesh to strain out the worst of the ash. He seems entirely engrossed in his task, and that’s both a comfort and a mite concerning, given how exposed they are. How easily someone else could stumble across this little body of water, how easy it would be for them to find Dirk. Take him.

Dave shudders at the thought, gorge rising in his throat. It’s not going to happen. Dave’s here, now. He’ll see anyone that the boy doesn’t. All the same, he finds himself scanning the woods, even as he strips out of his shirts and pants, thick socks and sturdy, worn shoes soon following. All this, he nudges closer to his pack, within easy reach. The boy still doesn’t look at him.

Dave sinks into the pond, the water biting cold and waist deep, and inhales sharply at the shock of it. The stones are slippery under his feet, cold and jagged and hungry for blood like everything else, without even the slick carpet of moss to tame their harshness. He keeps his shades on, brings a hand to his face to hold them there as he takes a breath, sinks under. The water feels like a tomb as it closes around his head. He sees the boy’s face blur and distort through the lens of the surface, turned to his vanishing form.

He closes his eyes, and gives himself to the cold.

(If he were Before, there would be metaphors bounding forth, diatribes and lectures on ironic baptisms, but here he is purged of all unnecessary to survive, nothing but a machine honed down to needs. Stripped down to the bare bones of who he needs to be to live.)

And when he re-emerges, inhaling deeply for cold air that blazes into his hungry lungs like a fire, lips parted in a benediction and plea, the boy (Dirk) is watching still.

\---

Four days come and go in varying shades of grey, in the sound of sleet and hail pounding against the cave to break the silence, and the hush of snowfall to break the sound of his heartbeat, the susurrations of his breath. The boy still hasn’t spoken, and Dave still speaks to himself. Cans of food diminish from both their stores- it turns out that they were concealed, that morning, hidden cleverly in another cranny. Dave watches him eat, and it’s not enough, a half a can a day, if not less. But he doesn’t offer to share; he’s yet to unlearn the selfishness that has kept him alive and been his constant companion. So easy it was, to forget how to be a parent.

And the boy remains silent.

It’s a different silence, than when he was walking; there is no fear, no constant vigilance nor the need to always look behind, ahead, around. There’s no thudding of singular footsteps, covered up by the rasp of ashen air into his lungs and nothing but the quiet like a pillow over his face suffocating him and crowding out everything from his head, where even the rough carrion-call of a crow would be more welcome, as would the raven quoting ‘nevermore’ in a belated proclamation of doom. Anything better than that cut-flower sound of simply waiting to die.

But now, there’s another person’s breathing, the quiet shuffle of footsteps against smooth stone, a few muffled coughs in the dead of night. The scraping of a spoon against the bottom of a can, on the occasion, along with wet crunches of whatever’s inside. Soft snores and focus so intense at times, Dave swears he can hear the boy thinking, even if he doesn’t speak. Even if he doesn’t acknowledge Dave in any way, at all.

It’s worse than the quiet, with solitude there like an albatross around his neck.

“Talk to me,” he says, and it’s very nearly a plea. The closest Dave will allow himself to get to one.

The boy merely looks at him, and his jaw is tight, shoulders tense, face inscrutable. And he looks away.

(Before, he was the only one that Dirk would talk to. Chubby hands gripped tight around his finger, words soft and halting at first, then tripping over his tongue, excitement sliding in; he’d been younger, then, before that chasm had opened up between them like the maw of a beast ready to devour them both. Now, the boy refuses to look at him. Barely recognizes him. It stings, more than Dave wants to admit).

He doesn’t try to ask again, after that.

\---

The boy is rarely there when Dave wakes up, even as he grows used to the strange presence that haunts the cave with him. They don’t quite share the space- it’s very clearly not Dave’s, but the boy makes himself smaller, folds in and tucks himself away into corners and shadows. Like a child co-existing with a monster, walking on eggshells and skirting the edges. Dave feels too big for this space, but he doesn’t know how to make himself smaller.

(He tries not to think about how Dirk would sidle close to ask for his attention without ever vocalizing the words, sit next to him on the couch and lean against his side, just for a second. Linger in the doorway, a question in his posture. He’d stopped doing that when they’d moved, Dave remembers. They’d both been busy, then.)

He makes it his job to stoke the fire, to gather wood- there’s no shortage of it, here, in this place that used to be a forest. He wonders if Dirk saw its slow decline, wonders how long the boy has been here for; he’d half-expected to find lines etched into the stone, a count of days past, but there’s nothing there. Nothing to answer his questions, and nothing to smother the low kindling of guilt that burns quiet in his chest, filling his lungs with smoke.

The boy usually returns before the sun is at its peak. Often with a beaten old bucket packed with snow, or an armful of branches, and only sometimes with another of those small bundles of what have to be food. The cave is warm when he returns, the fire crackling and Dave leaning against the wall next to it, soaking up the heat as if it can melt the chill that has long since settled into his bones.

Sometimes, Dave thinks about venturing out of the cave. Exploring, getting to know the woods. He does, twice. It would be so easy to get lost here, and not knowing the terrain is a risk he can’t afford to take. But he’s loathe to leave his supplies in the cave, and loathe to carry them with him on what’s only a trip of an hour or two- he doesn’t dare go too far, not yet. Not now, since he knows that he won’t be able to find his way back. He thinks of the boy in the empty cave, folded in to make room for someone who isn’t there. Someone who he maybe thinks is still coming back. And, well, Dave knows he can’t afford to not be here before night falls.

Those excursions, occasional as they are, leave his shoulders knotted tightly with the weight and the constant tension as his eyes dart back and forth for any other signs of movement. He keeps track of his steps but doesn’t dare to leave any marks to score his progress, not when they might lead someone straight back to the cave. To the boy. He never sees anyone, but only once does he hear the distant murmur of voices on the wind. He flattens himself against a tree even though they’re far, far off, and stays there, his heart pounding a sick beat in his chest and sweat beading on his forehead, until they fade away.

He tries and fails to teach himself to walk silently among the brittle branches that snap like bones beneath his feet. He wonders how long it took the boy to learn to do the same.

He always returns before dark, leaves himself plenty of time to get lost- which he does. Repeatedly. He doesn’t ask the boy for assistance; when he leaves, the boy is always doing something. Playing with those wires, tangling them in his fingers. Counting the cans in the little hollow he keeps them in. Rummaging through a worn-out backpack. Often, he’s doing something else entirely when Dave gets back, but he’s always there. Presumably having accomplished whatever it is he disappears off to do, sometimes, when Dave stays in.

They eat in silence when grey fades to black. Dave is painfully aware of his dwindling stash of food- three cans left, three days. More, if he eats less. He never finds anything when he goes out, though every knot in a tree seems to be another of the boy’s stashes. Dave thinks about taking them only once, but decides against it. He knows that there’s no way he can climb up and down those branches unscathed. And he knows that survival aside, it would be wrong.

He can’t bring himself to ask the boy for any food, so he rations, keeps a careful count. Somehow, there remains three cans in his bag.

(A part of him is waking up, one that feels like he should be the one offering the boy food. Going out to find more. Scanning this desolate patch of woods for anything new and anything dangerous. It’s the part of him that remembers an apartment with one bedroom, cramped and old with water that was always cold and a little brown. That remembers never getting enough sleep on a lumpy old futon. That remembers a warm body burrowing up against his own, so small and frightened, when there weren’t any monsters to be afraid of. That part of him remembers a promise whispered to sleeping ears in the dead of night, with only the sounds of the city and the silent puppet that his boy had clung to further back than he could remember.)

The boy gathers up his blankets, lays them out and curls up on and between them. He keeps the gun with him at all times, and his sword is always close. Dave sometimes wants to cross the distance between them, take those killing things out of the boy’s hands. Give him the tools to build something instead. But it’s a fleeting urge, and one that passes quickly. He doesn’t have any of the supplies that would be needed, and to be weaponless is to be nothing but a walking corpse. He knows that he would never be allowed that close, that he would never allow anyone else that close. Not here, not in this world.

The quiet now is less fraught with tension than it is in the light of day.

He’s sure he falls asleep before the boy, too, drifting off to the sound of his deep, even breathing. Breaths that catch and stutter, every so often. Half-asleep, the urge to get up and check on him is nothing but a passing fancy, a cloud drifting lazily across the landscape of his mind. Dave has his own nightmares to worry about, after all.

(Sometimes, though, he can’t help but think about a small, balled-up figure curling in against his side, soft cheeks wet with tears. He remembers putting his arm around it loosely, murmuring a shitty rap as a lullaby and listening to hitched breaths and muffled sobs fade to the even rhythms of someone asleep. Funny, how he can’t quite imagine doing that now.)

He lets the boy stay closest to the fire. He wouldn’t try to compete for the spot that’s so clearly claimed, not when he’s still learning how he fits in, here. He doesn’t think that the boy would let him, anyway. But it doesn’t matter- Dave doesn’t like being asleep so near to those crackling flames, mercurial in their dance. It would be so easy for one to jump onto a stray corner of blanket, and ignite a cocoon he couldn’t escape unscathed. And here, the cave is warm enough that it doesn’t matter.

This is how the days pass.

\---

The boy disappears, for three days.

Dave wakes to find him gone, the cave empty, the fire dead and cold. He doesn’t notice anything different at first, assuming that the embers have simply gone out and that he has woken up later than usual.

He hasn’t.

He also assumes that the boy will be back soon, any minute now. His things are all hidden and gone, but that means nothing- they always are, before he leaves. No matter how short a time. He feels like he should be offended, but it’s nothing that he doesn’t understand. He would do the same. He’s been doing the same.

He waits for hours on that first day for him to come back, stoking the fire and rationalizing away a panic that greets him like an old friend, a sore, disused muscle protesting. Dirk leaves often to secure his little packages, to scavenge around, this is nothing new. This is what Dave tells himself, to pass the time, to whittle away the excruciating awareness of just how long it’s been since he’s last seen the boy. How much longer he’s taking this time. He remains in the cave the entire time, telling himself that it won’t be much longer. Not wanting to not be here, when he comes back. Which he will. The boy has always returned before.

(But Before, Dirk was always there, waiting for him when he got home. He was awake, even when Dave stumbled through the door half-drunk at three in the morning. It’s different now, he knows.)

A day passes, night settles in like a funeral shroud. That’s when Dave starts to worry in earnest, the panic creeping in, stealing away precious sleep, and with every beat of his heart, another thing that could have happened. Fallen from one of those spindly branches he climbs with such ease, hurt himself badly. Died. Been found by someone else, taken. Killed. His stomach churns with unease, the dinner he’d forced himself to have threatening to crawl up his throat, burning sour in his gullet. He doesn’t vomit. It would be a waste of food.

He manages to fall asleep some time before the fire dies completely, curled up close to it in the spot that the boy usually occupies. Dave’s dreams that night are disjointed things, filled with masks cracking open to reveal slavering jaws and red, lolling tongues, lips obscenely wide and crimson-stained with the blood of those who couldn’t escape. He runs through a land of screeching metal gears and lava, heat scorching his skin. There’s a shattered sword in his hands that he clutches with a death-grip. Something is under the lava, a beast of heat and clockwork, and he can see the molten flow rise in waves as it moves, nothing but a dark shape. There’s the sound of barking, faint, and in the sky, there hovers a disk like an old record carved of stone. Below him, the lava bulges, pregnant, growing thin as it starts to sluice off in a viscous flow that burns and hardens to black before cracking like the shell of an egg. The sound is deafening. He sees the suggestion of eyes, and the glowing blaze of a gaping maw and jagged teeth.

Dave wakes in a cold sweat, his mouth dry. The sliver of grey light that filters in above the fire, now burnt down to the barest of embers and ash, tells him that it’s morning. His body aches, his eyes burn. He’s still hazy with sleep, but there’s an apology on his tongue ready to be made to the boy- who isn’t here. He’s still not here.

Dave sits bolt upright, knocking his head against the wall in a starburst of pain in the process. He should be back by now. If he was going to be gone longer, he’d have-

No, he wouldn’t have said anything, Dave realizes, his stomach leaden as his head throbs. There’s no reason for him to. But, if he’d wanted to leave permanently, more would be packed up. And it certainly would take more than a night. This logic does nothing to dispel the cold dread seeping into his bones. He should look for the boy, venture out, but he’s almost certain that he wouldn’t be able to hide this place properly, let alone find it again if he did. And he has no idea what else might lurk in these woods.

Dave curses, startlingly loud in the silence. Fuck. _Fuck._ He can’t wander far, but he can’t sit here and do nothing. He _can’t_.

He’ll leave the cave, today. Check the surrounding areas for a- no, for the boy. He’ll find him, albeit staying close, because the boy has never strayed far, before. And of course he’ll be alive, if not entirely unscathed. The branches on those trees are spiderweb thin and brittle, like as not to turn to dust at a touch. Dave tries not to think of the boy’s body lying broken on the hard ground, neck twisted and eyes blank and unseeing, or of the boy, slumped and bleeding out, pallid and crying and needing help, calling for it, with Dave too far to hear. Or of a half-rotted corpse, picked clean by the only scavengers left. It makes him feel sick, sends a tremor down his spine, and curls into a knot in his throat.

Dave doesn’t stop for breakfast. He shrugs on a jacket from his pack- two sizes too big and already grey and fraying at the hems, but it’s warm. It’ll blend in. He’s out for hours and hours, looking with a mounting desperation. He half-expects to see him jump out of a tree, land neatly on his feet, and ask Dave why he looks so out of breath. Except he wouldn’t ask that, would he. And after that, he becomes more and more worried that around the next tree he’ll see a body twisted and broken from a fall, surrounded by a few fallen, flaky branches. All it would take is one misstep.

But he doesn’t find anything, and as the light begins to dim and fade, he knows that he has to turn back to the cave. To the direction he thinks it is. He finds that he hasn’t gone far at all. Those hours of circling and searching condense into thirty three minutes of walking in a straight line to get back- with a few missteps, of course. But he remembers the way, even in the sameness of the woods.

The next day is much of the same, though Dave goes further out, this time. He spends nearly an hour wandering, lost, failing to fight against the mounting panic and the grief that’s still threatening to rise and choke him. There’s nothing close by, nowhere that the boy could have gone to that wouldn’t take him longer than one day. He’s sure of that. And his chances of returning are so, so slim, after the first. And now Dave’s lost, too, he’ll wander and freeze or fall like he’s sure the boy did.

None of that happens. He manages, through sheer dumb luck, to find the stream again. He nearly falls to his knees at the sight of it, relief buckling them. He doesn’t want to return to the cave, empty without the boy, but- it’d be a waste of a good shelter. It’s dark by the time he gets back and slips inside. Dave doesn’t bother with a fire, just curls up around his bag and the hollowness in his stomach and chest. He doesn’t notice it when he falls asleep, not until there’s a slight shift in the air. Something cooler, fresher. Dave just stirs, sight bleary and mind muzzy with the remnants of sleep. He’d been dreaming, about something pleasant. A day at the beach, maybe, with the sun burning bright and fierce in the sky. But there’s a breeze in the cave, too, cool against his skin, and he sits bolt upright.

There’s someone outside. Silent, silhouetted against the wan light of the moon through the clouds, is a figure that’s surely too tall to be the boy in this half-light. They’re lean, with fingers curled around a duffel bag, held loosely to one side. The other hand rests on the hilt of his sword.

Intruder. How did they find this place- _that’s Dirk’s sword something’s happened they took him and made him tell but he's still alive he has to be-_

The figure slips into the mouth of the cave and is laden down with two bulging bags, and Dave’s hand goes to his sword immediately, before he steps into the brighter light closer to the fire- a fire, Dave now realizes, that he didn’t light. _Christ_. Its warm light throws familiar features into harsh relief. Barely-there freckles, lank blonde hair that’s far longer and far more unkempt than he remembers it being. Narrow, sloping shoulders. A mouth forever closed.

“Dirk,” he says, hoarse, near beside himself with relief. He can’t stop himself from crossing the cave, wrapping the boy in his arms and holding him tight, damn near crushing him to his chest, because Dirk is alive, Dirk is _here_. He’s back, he came back. He nearly forgets that the boy hasn’t touched him, hasn’t done more than looked at him for a few seconds at a time- until the boy’s slipping out of his grip with an almost desperate twist, and stepping away until he’s out of reach.

It’s the first human contact he’s had in- it has to be years, since this entire fucking nightmare began. Since he left an empty, gutted mansion and started walking west. It strikes him like a bolt of lightning to the core, and when the boy eels away, there’s still that instinct to hold on. A knot grows in his throat, his breath catching in it. He’s still reeling. He wonders how long it’s been for the boy, but he knows, surely, it had to have been more.

(Before, he was never very receptive to touch to begin with. The most Dave would be allowed is a hand on top of his head, a fistbump. Occasionally a hug, after Dirk turned four and was too old to be worming his way onto the futon with him at night. Dave supposes he shouldn’t be surprised that this hasn’t changed. That he doesn’t want to touch the brother that left him.)

Dave doesn’t realize what misstep he’s made until he sees the boy’s face, contorted in confusion, and something that looks a lot like resentment. His heart drops, a stone settles in his gut. Those writhing tentacles of guilt rise, threatening to choke him again. His arms are still wrapped around thin air. Dave forces them to his sides, shoves his hands into his pockets like that will make them stop shaking.

He doesn’t regret it, though, and he finds himself craving more contact almost instantly.

“I- thought something had happened,” he says, lamely. It feels inadequate. “You were gone for days. You didn’t say anything.”

The boy is still silent, but his expression has smoothed out. Perfectly neutral. Just like he’d learned, just like he’d been taught. Dave knows that his voice has turned petulant, almost whining, with the last sentence, but he can’t stop himself. It’s true. All of it is true. He _left_.

“You should have told me you were leaving,” is what he settles on to finish it. He ends up sounding like a disappointed parent, and the boy’s shoulders tense at it. Anything else he might say withers and dies in his throat as the boy simply shoulders past him to settle in too close to the fire, leaning against the flame-warmed rock.

And deposits the first bag next to another, and begins to unpack. Ignoring Dave entirely.

(Some small part of him wonders if this is how Dirk felt, Before. Overlooked entirely, like a ghost. Like an echo of a person, no longer there.)

Dave feels small and insignificant. Historically, this is not something he’s responded well to, and it’s almost gratifying to know that he still has a part of himself to cling to, however small. And just like it would have in the past, something roaring and furious rises in him- three _days_ of worrying out of his fucking mind, of pants-shitting anxiety and paralyzing fear and the thought of losing his _brother_ forever, this time, for real, and the boy won’t even apologize?

He stalks over until he’s looming over the boy, his fingers balled into tight fists at his sides. There’s the quiet rustling, soft thuds, as the boy removes cans of food, bits of sharp metal, several lighters. A half-empty container of water. And doesn’t even look at Dave. He registers, absently, that there is enough food there for the both of them for two weeks, if they ration it carefully. He wonders where Dirk went to find it.

There’s something dried and flaking on one of the bags, and a matching dark stain on the boy’s jacket.

“I thought you were _dead_ ,” Dave hisses out. No reaction, nothing other than that same rhythm of unpacking. The silence amplifies, mocking. “Look at me. Dirk. _Fucking look at me._ ”

He’s not shouting now, but he’s dangerously close, and he doesn’t notice the anger that bleeds red hot from that empty space in his chest and into his voice, burning the air between them. The boy’s hands pause, for just a moment, slim fingers curling into fists. But he still doesn’t talk- and maybe it’s because he can’t, the rational part of Dave knows. But the rest of him is hurt and furious and so, so relieved still. He wants to take him by his shoulders and shake him and make the boy notice him, say something, shove him away. Anything.

He does none of those things, and for a while, there is only the sound of his own breathing, harsh and magnified in the cave. That, and the quiet rustling of the bags.

Dave stands there, rooted to the spot. This is a challenge, some innate part of him understands. A test, to see if he’ll back down and give up. But he won’t. He crosses his arms, and waits.

Waits, for what’s sure to be nearly an hour, until everything is neatly lined up against one wall of the cave, sorted out by a system he feels like he should know.

He waits, until brilliant amber-orange eyes meet his own, flat and angry and confused, and his heart leaps to his throat. Finally. _Finally_.

The boy presses his lips together in a hard, flat line, as if to keep the words in, if there are any words at all. But no, Dave realizes, perhaps it’s simply because he can’t get them out. Desperate, he holds the boy’s gaze, waiting. Hoping. There’s a moment where he thinks the boy might speak, and Dave swears that his heart skips a beat then, but. There’s nothing, only silence, and the way the boy’s hands curl into fists at his side, his shoulders curved with tension.

There’s nothing, and the boy looks away, slowly returns to his packing. Though not before putting his shades back on, unhooking them from the front of his shirt. That too, Dave understands, but he doesn’t reach for his own cracked lenses. He feels wide awake and alert, electric, with something that isn’t a victory but feels close to one.

\---

The boy starts to tell him when he’ll be gone for longer than a day, but he never asks Dave to come with him. Tell is too strong a word for what actually happens, which is the boy lingers until Dave wakes up, despite the fact that it’s wasting light, and Dave asks. He learns that a flat stare means yes, whereas looking away means no. It’s far from a perfect system, and the boy doesn’t touch him once to shake him awake. Even though he could. Even though he should, so he can get further with the daylight. Not that Dave blames him for this, though. He knows that he wouldn’t react well to being woken up like that. It was so easy to unlearn trust, it’s almost shocking how difficult it is to practice it again.

Nor does he say where he’s going, though Dave has seen a worn-thin map carefully secreted away in his backpack at the beginning of every trip. He never offers it up, or even makes the attempt to gesture vaguely to his destination. The worry is unfamiliar, but slow to creep on. Dave trusts that he can take care of himself, after all. That he’ll come back. But sometimes he pulls out his own map, stares at the faded lines and colors of it, the slightly distorted surface like it can tell him where the boy is going, how long he’ll be gone for.  It makes him wonder if he’d seen anything on the way here. Towns, cities. Signs pointing to either. But it’s likely the boy’s going in an entirely different direction. He most likely avoids the road as much as he can, and Dave is sure he knows these woods like the back of his hand.

Either way, Dave thinks they’ve reached a sort of equilibrium. A silent coexistence, here, as the days gradually grow shorter, the nights colder. The usual chore of bringing wood in, and he’s getting better at picking out branches that will actually burn. Making sure the fire is lit by the time afternoon fades into late evening. He brings in water from the pool, and uses the mesh to purify it in the cave. He doesn’t attempt to take another bath- not without the boy there to keep watch. He doesn’t want to be out there alone longer than he needs to.

(He wants to be here when the boy gets back.)

Things are left behind whenever the boy leaves, too. A can or two of food. The blankets- first one, then another, then the entire heap of them reappears. The wires the boy was playing with, earlier. A few old batteries and a flashlight. They don’t work anymore, Dave’s tried. He brings in wood for the fire, every day, so that they have a little stockpile in the cave. It starts to feel a little more like home, instead of just a shelter that would be so easily overlooked, so easily ignored. He wants it to be warm, when the boy returns.

They still don’t talk at night, despite the easy routine they’ve fallen into. Dave tries, every so often. Quiet observations, chatter to fill the silence. He knows the boy is listening (Dirk always listened to him, always wanted to hear what he had to say- until he didn’t), but there’s no forthcoming response. He’s almost desperate, now, to hear the sound of his voice. Of another human voice that isn’t his own.

There’s nothing, and some nights the quiet sounds of them eating their food (Dave has found cans mysteriously appearing in his own bag, just one at a time, every other day) is enough to make him want to scream. But he tamps down on the urge. The boy will talk to him, he’s sure. He will. Dave just needs to wait.

It’s as if that confrontation reminded him of everything he’d forgotten, everything he told himself that he would never have again. He remembers casual touches, accidentally brushing against some stranger on a crowded street. And he craves them, in the hollow place in his chest where he stores all those memories, never to be revisited. Why would he dwell on something that’s an impossibility, after all? It doesn't make sense to waste effort on it. On wanting what he knows he can't have- because the boy flinches away whenever Dave gets even within a foot of him, not nearly close enough to touch. Barely within arm's reach.

(Dave sees him looking, sometimes. And he wonders if the boy has forgotten what a friendly touch feels like. If he'd ever bring himself to ask for one. They're disjointed and uncertain, two people not used at all to being in each other's space. But they manage their separate existences in the same area well enough. Dave ignores the half-formed plans to accidentally brush against him. This is enough.)

But then a storm hits. It rains for days, and the supplies in the cave dwindle. They use less firewood, and the first foot near the tarp is soaked, though it does a manageable job of keeping the rest of the lashing moisture out. The wind howls around them, always, eerie. They have enough food, Dave knows, but the amount in the cave is dwindling. The boy hadn’t retrieved more before the storm hit. Dave thinks that perhaps he didn’t know it would come- the signs were all there, in the quickening of the wind, the tang of humidity in the air. The darkness of the clouds like a smudge of charcoal on the horizon, encroaching closer each sunrise.

Perhaps it’s simply because he has always had shelter, never had to learn the signs or worry about what was to come while on the road. Or perhaps it’s simply because there have rarely been storms as bad as this, here.

He can tell that the boy is worried. Those signs have remained the same; he fidgets, curls the wire tight enough around his finger that the tip goes white and bloodless. He paces, and then goes still for long periods, except for his fingers tapping against his knee.

(Dave can see him, silhouetted against a window, or curled up on his bed, or sitting with his legs dangling off a roof. That same tapping, the same restless movements of his hands and a barely-contained thrum of anxiety covering him like a cloak. Dave would rest a hand on his shoulder and squeeze, catch one of Dirk’s hands in his own. He’d marvelled at how small Dirk’s had been compared to his, then.)

He hesitates, wanting to break the silence, to cross the cave and do those things again, that long-buried fraternal instinct rearing its head again. It does that so often, these days. But he knows that the boy wouldn’t accept it, that it would just drive that wedge deeper between them. He doesn’t know how long it’s been, since the boy has seen another human being. Let another human being touch him. If there was a god, he’d pray that it wasn’t since Before, since Dave left that last time.

(But, that’s not quite right, is it? They hadn’t been affectionate for a long time, then. Dave doesn’t think that he even bothered to say goodbye. He hates himself for that, more than he hates himself for forgetting, for mourning and grieving and getting over it.)

“Dirk,” he says, and the sound echoes through the cave, despite being soft. The boy doesn’t look up, but he unravels the wire wrapped around his finger, slow and deliberate. Dave will count this as a victory, one of many small ones he’s been tallying up, recently. Each one a new stone fitted to a bridge between them, built over the ashes of the old one. Or maybe he’s just hoping too much, pushing too far.

Dave had stopped eating when he was halfway through the can, his head cocked to listen to the wind start to pick up again outside. Hungry, it howls. The boy isn't the only one concerned, but the lulls between the gusts have been gradually getting longer. They won't be desperate and trapped in here, and it will be over soon. Of this much, he's sure.

He gets up, walks over in three long strides. Slow, to give the boy time to move away, if he wants to. He approaches his brother and tries to exude some sense of peace, whatever the fuck that means. But whatever he ends up doing must work, since the boy doesn’t flinch away. There’s still a line of tension clear in his shoulders, but. He’s turning his head to glance at Dave, just briefly.

“Dirk,” he says again, to get his attention. Look at me, is what he doesn’t say, but it hangs unspoken in the air between them. He holds out the can, and Dirk looks at him, before taking it. A hot thrill of pride unfurls in his chest, even as his stomach remains hollow, empty. Dave remembers how to starve, though, and he can do it again. Always, for him.

\---

The storm ends the next evening, blustering itself out against the rocks and trees. Dave can tell when it starts to peter out, and then again when it seems to stop properly. When the howling fades to silence, and the sound of branches breaking subsides. He doesn’t need to inform the boy, not really; when he pads over to peer outside and survey the wreckage, there’s the whisper of footsteps against dirt behind him.

He steps outside, and it feels like the world has taken a breath around him. Instinctively, Dave looks up to what he so badly wishes were brilliant blue skies, clear but for the distant sun finally shining through the thunderheads. But all he gets here is a lighter shade of grey, and the same dull wasteland as before. Branches litter the ground, which is still soggy and slick with rain. He knows that the mud will cling to his shoes, cloying and sticky, seeping inside and numbing his toes and making his footsteps clumsy, squelching things. It’s an entirely unpleasant experience he anticipates.

But the boy’s brow is furrowed, his lips tilted downwards in a slight frown. He shows no sign of wanting to move, just yet. Surely he’s concerned about those bundles of food, precious supplies stacked on brittle branches that now litter the ground like so many broken bones in the den of a beast.

“Are we going out?” Dave asks, casting a dubious eye at the mud. Which is certainly the reason the boy doesn’t want to venture out just yet. Of course, there’s no answer, nothing other than the barest shake of his head. Even that makes Dave want to grin wide, though, and that same hot pride from the night before glows bright like an ember, radiating warmth.

(Dirk was always fastidious, for a kid. Never played in the dirt, never got himself messy and always cleaned up after. Dave remembers thinking that he was nothing like that; their mother had forever been chastising him for smearing mud into his hair, getting dirt or apple juice or ketchup on his shirt. He remembers thinking that most kids were messy, too, almost as soon as he’d outgrown his own phase.)

And, of course, there’s the issue of footprints. Lightly as Dirk treads, there’s simply no way to avoid leaving an obvious, deadly trail between supply points and the cave, no matter how many circles he walks in.

After all, there’s no telling who (what) is now in these woods with them. A chill runs down his spine, and Dave turns to scan their surroundings. Left, right, behind. The branches of the trees. His ears strain to pick up any sounds- cracking, rustling. But there is only his heartbeat thudding in his chest, and the boy’s breathing beside him.

“Good call,” Dave agrees, comfortably. He leans slightly against the rock face, and then flinches away when he realizes it’s freezing cold and soaking wet. He catches the boy watching him, still inscrutable, but Dave thinks that there must be something close to amusement in his eyes under those shades. His fingers itch to take them off and see. He tucks his hands into the pockets of his jacket instead.

“Tomorrow, then? We can do recon and all that good shit,” he continues, glancing at the boy out of the corner of his eye. He’s surprised to find him looking right back.

Even better is the way he gives a small nod in response. It’s just the barest of things, really, but it nearly brings a grin to Dave’s face. He ducks his head, and lets the corners of his mouth rise a little in response. The movement feels strange, after so long. Clumsy and unpracticed, and he’s sure that it’s uglier than ever, carving deep chasms at the sides of his mouth and his eyes.

He doesn’t see the way the boy’s eyes widen behind dark glasses, or hear the slight intake of breath at the sight.

\---

They do go out the next day, as promised, and Dave finds himself strangely nervous. He hasn’t been out of the cave with Dirk since that first day, and although they have left things there, his backpack is still a weight on his shoulders, his coat a buffer against the cold, still air. When he breathes out, it hangs in a puff in front of his face, just for a moment.

The boy’s backpack is entirely empty, in comparison. Dave knows it’s because he hopes to bring supplies back in, but it’s still a shock. Knowing that the boy feels safe enough here, that he doesn’t take everything he owns with him when he ventures out. The katana is in his hands, though, the gun at his belt. It’s in a proper holster, too. Dave wonders where he’d gotten it, but he knows better than to ask.

(Did he raid a gun store? Steal it off a corpse? None of those are impossible. Dave doesn’t know if he wants to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Dirk had been with someone out here, or somewhere else. If he had someone to take care of him, or a person to take care of, back when it all began. He knows that he should be happy about it- it is so, so dangerous to be without allies in a world like this. But that person wouldn’t have been Dave.)

The day is as clear as it will get, with the sky a monotone of grey above them, paler than it’s been since before the storm. It’s silent, too, and Dave is all-too aware of how his footsteps break that blanket of stillness. The boy moves with a catlike ease, in comparison, barely ghosting over the mud that hardened back into dirt overnight. His footprints are barely noticeable, the soles of his shoes worn smooth. He’s also sure he catches the boy giving him a few glances that read as exasperated, or mild annoyance, but that’s a triumph in itself. Even if he probably is making far too much noise for comfort, he can’t bring himself to mind. He knows that he’ll still be quieter than anyone else new to this place.

Dave’s tempted to talk, to break the silence and pass the time as the boy leads him to what he assumes is their first stop. He avoids the worst of the broken branches, but he can still see the boy’s shoulders tense when a select few crack under his feet. He flinches, too. The sound is loud as a gunshot in this unearthly silence. He hates it, the quiet, hates the way it weighs down on him settles like a static hum in his ears. But he doesn’t attempt to talk, no matter how tempting it might be to get yet another reaction from the boy. He knows that he’s making enough noise already, and even if cracking branches in the distance may not be enough to alert hypothetical others to their presence, the sound of his voice certainly will. And Dave refuses to put himself and the boy in that kind of danger.

He thinks that anyone who hadn’t found shelter, who’d been desperate enough to wander into the woods, surely wouldn’t be in a group larger than two or three. He thinks that they’d be the same as him, the same as the boy. Just trying to survive in this world. He thinks that maybe he might want to give them a chance, as far as potential interaction. Maybe even a nudge in the right direction back to the road. They won’t be able to survive here, in the long term, after all. And he knows better than to offer food, better than to confirm that he has what they don’t, that he has what they need. What he knows that they’ll do anything to get.

But they don’t encounter anyone. Not even when the boy stops to frown at what is clearly a blackened package on the ground, so easily recognizable without distance to mask its presence. He tucks it into his backpack without a word. Dave turns, scans the area around them for either similar packages (he thinks he’s getting better at spotting them, now that he partially knows where to look- i.e., the ground).

Dave lets himself relax. Just a little.

This is, of course, a mistake.

They manage two hours and fourteen minutes without incident, walking out and then back in, in concentric circles- an exercise that Dave finds dizzying, but the boy had actually scratched out an illustration in the dirt as an explanation. He’d been happy to just go along with it, the theory sounded solid; why worry about someone over a mile away and waste energy on it? They’d move on soon enough, after all. Drawn away by the road and the city itself. What he didn’t consider is how exhausting this is as an idea, and the boy receives a few somewhat baleful glances for picking such a wide radius to begin with.

They run into the other group at the point of their little exercise closest to the road, after two circles. Dave has noticed that the boy seems tense, whenever they near this way, but he doesn’t pass comment. He does step a little closer to the boy in the best gesture of solidarity he can muster up, but it’s the boy who sees them first. Dave nearly doesn’t notice- it’s just a distant movement in the trees, one that wouldn’t have registered if not for the fact that he’s been getting used to what things look like in a place like this, if scanning his surroundings hadn’t been second nature. And, of course, it’s how the boy _freezes_ at his side that makes him stop entirely. Yank the boy behind a tree and hold him close without a single regard given to the dislike of being touched.

There’s voices, too. Two, maybe three distinct ones, and they’re taking care not to be heard. He doesn’t know if they’ve seen him and the boy. He knows they haven’t heard them. He can hear their footsteps now, loud and clumsy things that crack branches and makes them curse quietly at ground. Three. One woman, he thinks, two men. Almost certainly armed, but too small to be a scouting party for a gang or for one of the bloodcults. Their hunting grounds tend towards the more populated, anyway.

 _Run_ , he mouths at the boy, his fingers digging into the fabric of his jacket. Opposite directions, they’ll meet back at the cave. If they make it. They have to make it. The boy will use the gun if he gets into trouble, though, and Dave knows that he can find him if that’s the case. He’ll hear it. The boy nods, and his breathing is fast and shallow, but so, so quiet. They’re close enough that he can see the outlines of his eyes behind those ridiculous shades, the barest hint of darkened amber.

He forces himself to let go. The boy is off like a shot, running silently through the trees in a parallel path. He waits, breathes in. Once, twice- a shout, they’ve seen him but they’re not going to get him, not now and not ever-, and he steps out from behind the tree.

Everything in him is saying that he should run.

Instead, he comes to a stop in front of them, and purposely rests one hand on the hilt of his sword. The other he puts right by the slit of one of his jacket’s pockets. Enough to bluff that he has a gun, there. Not enough to fool in the scenario where he’d actually be pulling one. They freeze, like deer in the headlights of a truck, when he emerges. Dave scans them over automatically; two men and a woman, one of the men almost sickly pale and limping. He won’t last long. The woman is the one with the gun, and with a staff made of a metal pipe strapped across her back. The other man is supporting the sick one, holding two packs that look woefully empty.

Her hand is on the gun, too. Dave keeps his face in the perfectly blank mask that he learned and perfected in another life, and tightens his grip on the katana’s hilt.

“You sheltering from the storm here, too?” he asks, purposely light. For once, he wishes he was dirtier. His palms are clammy, and he can feel his heart pounding out of his chest. All he has to do is buy time, time enough for the boy to get far enough away, and then he can run. Five minutes is all he’ll need, Dave’s sure. Five minutes, he can do.

“Yeah,” comes the answer. From the man who can actually stand. Dave lets something like sympathy crawl onto his face as he nods.

“Yeah. Shit was bad. I ended up stuck in a lean-to I had to tie to a tree, to get by.” Lie. “Rain kept coming in through it, but sometimes you gotta take your showers where you can get them.”

That gets a rusty chuckle from the wounded one.

“Anything good around here?” the woman asks. She lets her hand drift away from the gun, slightly, and Dave relaxes the one by his pocket as he shakes his head.

“Trees, and that’s pretty much it. Never really intended to stay here this long, but the storm was a nightmare. There’s still branches falling around all over the place, even if it ain’t that windy anymore.”

“Yeah. Must’ve seen one down that way,” the woman says, and gestures loosely to where Dirk had vanished. He raises his eyebrows. She’s not wearing glasses, but if she thought the boy was a branch, she either needs them badly or the boy is a lot faster than Dave gave him credit for.

“Probably? Those things’ve been crashing down all day and scaring me shitless. Didn’t know whether you moving in the distance was just more of that or not, but then I heard voices, and, well.” He shrugs, false nonchalant. They’re not in any danger. And his own pack is thankfully empty aside from one bundle in it, and a strip of cloth to serve as a scarf. He knows it doesn’t look like he has anything worth stealing. He wants to believe that they won’t try and hurt him, anyway.

“Won’t ask if you’ve got supplies or not, nobody really shares what they’ve got. We’re all desperate. But if you knew about any you could point me in the direction of?” she trails off, purposely. Dave can honestly shake his head, here. Beyond the city in the distance, he doesn’t know, and he tells them this.

“Yeah, well I’m not too chickenshit to ask if you’ve got supplies, so do you?” the hurt man asks, and Dave has to admire his brashness.

“Nothing that’d last you three longer than a day. And no medicine, either,” he adds. The apologetic note in his voice isn’t faked at all. The woman’s hand is entirely away from her gun, now, and Dave releases the hilt of his sword. They don’t press further and ask if there was anyone else with him, even though he can see the calculation in the men’s eyes. They can guess that there’s someone else here, someone who ran at the first sight of them just before Dave showed up. But they have enough sense to know that he’s long gone.

“Yeah. All that shit’s in the hands of the big gangs,” the man says, glaring bitterly down at his leg. “And they’re a bucketful of shitfuck crazy we don’t want to get near. For obvious fucking reasons.”

“Right,” he agrees, solemnly. With him, they won’t stand a chance of getting away in time if anyone decided to hunt them down. And Dave knows that they would have left him in the storm, if they were going to at all. It’s this that makes him offer up another piece of information, just a warning: “There’s a city maybe a day and a half’s walk from here. Not a huge one, since it’s still the middle of fuck-nowhere, but. Maybe you might wanna avoid that. The road signs’ll tell you where it is, exactly, and you can get back onto the good old asphalt if you head that way.” He gestures to the left to illustrate his point. It might take fifteen minutes or so, but it’s a straight shot that’ll get them there.

“Thanks,” the woman says, solemn. Dave nods, and they’re the first to turn away and start to walk. Their progress is almost painfully slow, but Dave doesn’t move until they’re out of sight amongst the trees. He knows that he’ll never see them again, just like he knows that the wounded one probably isn’t going to make it more than two weeks. If he fights. If they don’t run into trouble. But he wishes them the best in the silence under the trees.

It takes him another hour to get back to the cave, since he decides to let his path meander somewhat. Scope out the rest of the woods for any other intruders. He knows that he was just lucky those were good people, otherwise he’d have been shot on sight. But the boy still would have had that head start. He’s waiting for Dave near the mouth of the cave, and there’s something wet smeared on the hem of his jacket’s sleeve. He shifts it out of sight, before Dave can ask, and the boy spends a long moment looking at him. Looking him over, Dave realizes. To see if he’s hurt.

He can’t quite hide the smile on his face as he turns around to display that he’s perfectly fine. Seemingly satisfied, the boy nods, and turns to head back in. The cave is already warm and waiting for them, and Dave settles in easily.

Over dinner, which is a can of beans each, to celebrate, Dave recounts what had happened. The boy doesn’t offer more of a reaction than a slow, contemplative nod, but Dave doesn’t push for more.

It turns out that he doesn’t need to. When they finish eating, when the tarp has been secured properly for the night and they’ve settled into that silence again, the boy turns to face him. He opens his mouth, and Dave sits bolt upright almost immediately. His heart is hammering in anticipation and in a plea- he’s going to talk, Dave’s going to hear his _voice_ for the first time in far too long.

(There’s a flash of guilt that sours the moment, when he realizes that he’s forgotten what the boy sounds like.)

And then he does talk, and it’s everything Dave wanted it to be. His voice is rough and hoarse with disuse, and he’s so, so quiet. But he’s talking, and Dave’s hanging on every word. He doesn’t interrupt, despite himself. Not as the boy starts to tell his story. Not just from today, but from the beginning.

Dirk speaks carefully, his sentences short and stilted as he recounts what happened. The flash, seen by all, the sudden cut of power. Darkness where there was light, and ash like snow falling thick to blanket the earth, to blot out the sun. The panic, the hysteria sweeping the cities, roads choked with thousands of bodies alive, dead, and dying. The slow death of hope as days and night blended to that same shade of grey, as it got colder and colder and food got scarcer. Dave knows that he’s leaving some out, glossing over details; they’ve both seen the horrors that came after. Lived through them, too.

(Dave has seen his scars, but the boy has never said how he’s gotten them. Dave hasn’t shared how he came by his own. But there is blood, and knives, faces painted garish-gory and concealed behind gas masks, smiles hungry and eyes ravenous. They’ve both already screamed out all the words to talk about it.)

The boy has to stop often, barely looks at Dave while he talks like he’s emptying himself by handfuls. Measured syllables, mispronounced and soft as the falling rain. He only stops when the fire has dimmed to embers glowing golden, the warmth a mockery of the one remembered from a lifetime ago.

It’s the best thing that Dave has ever heard.

“You’ve been alone since then. Since coming here.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t- have any trouble.” He finishes the sentence, lamely. Dave’s acutely aware of the ache in his chest. Dirk coughs once, in the silence the sound is wet and thick.

“Not here. I’m hard to find.”

“Nobody’s passed through?”

“Nobody that saw me. Or knew I was here.”

“I saw you.”

“I know.”

“Was it because-?”

“You left,” is what he says, after a long pause. His hand presses against his chest, hard. Dave can almost feel his own caving in, wet earth after a storm. He doesn’t need to ask the boy to elaborate on that.

“I’m sorry.”

There’s nothing in the way of response; the boy turns away, stokes the fire. Dave’s own inadequacy balloons, hot and bloated, to fill the silence. There’s nothing left that he can say- there are some things that apologies can’t reach, and sins that cannot be atoned for.

Neither of them speak again, that night, and Dave falls asleep to the image of the boy silhouetted against the fire, curled in on himself.

\---

“It’s getting colder.” Dave finally says. The boy looks at him, his fingers tightening around the worn old spoon he’s using.

“I know.”

“We can’t stay here.”

“You don’t have to.”

“You won’t survive if you stay.”

“There isn’t anywhere to go.”

“We can find somewhere. The coast. South.”

“No.”

“Dirk.”

“You don’t have to stay.”

“ _Dirk._ ”

Silence.

“Talk to me.”

The boy shakes his head, stands up abruptly. His shoulders shake, his throat convulses as if he’s choking on words unspoken. Dave reaches out to thump him on the back, but he steps away, out of reach. His hand lingers in the distance between them for a moment longer, before he lets it drop.

The last he sees of Dirk that night is the curve of his spine, silhouetted dark against the fire as it dims down slowly to embers.

\---

“We need to go,” Dave tries again, the next night.

“You don’t have to stay.”

\---

“We need to go.”

“You don’t have to stay.”

\---

It snows, the next day. Dave wakes up to Dirk gone- not entirely unusual, except for the fact that the tarp has been left to blow back, fluttering in the wind. He sits up immediately, convinced that something’s wrong, a bolt of panic searing through him and making him scramble for his sword. Where’s Dirk, is there someone else outside, no he can’t hear anyone, not footsteps or voices, and-

Something lands on his face, cold enough to sting for a second, before it fades to wet warmth.

Oh.

He holds on to his shitty sword, though, as he shoves his feet into shoes and tugs on his coat, keeping the blanket wrapped over his shoulders. Dave sees the outside in flashes as the tarp shifts in the wind: pure white, a single figure with its head tipped up to the sky, white on the jagged shapes of the blackened trees, no noise other than the wind. He deems it safe to come out when the boy notices him, and gestures him over.

It warms a part of him that the fire has never been able to reach.

Stepping outside feels like walking into a goddamn Christmas song, from Before, though he neglects to mention that comparison to Dirk. Instead, he hums the tune quietly under his breath, off-key. Eddies of snow curl in the breeze, and Dave now realizes that it isn’t white like he thought. It’s at best a pale shade of grey, but there are flakes that are nearly as dark as the trees themselves. He stops humming.

The boy has his eyes closed, his tongue stuck out as if to catch a flake, and Dave nudges him in warning.

(He remembers the first time they’d seen snow- it was visiting the Lalondes for Christmas, one year. Upstate New York, hit by a blizzard two days before the holiday itself. They’d ended up buried in over a foot of snow, but Dave will always remember the way Dirk’s eyes widened in delight and then confusion, when he’d actually gotten outside, only to discover that it was both freezing cold and wet, not to mention thoroughly unpleasant when soaked into clothing. The boy had run outside in only his socks and pajamas. Dave, at least, had stolen Rose’s slippers.)

The contact is brief, but it’s another warmth that lingers, even as the breeze slams the flurries into them both.

“Do you think it’ll keep going?” he asks, looking around.

The boy considers it, closing his mouth before anything vaguely toxic does actually land in it. He shakes his head after a moment.

Dave accepts this with a nod. It’s only the first snow, after all. But first means more, and there’s already a half-inch on the ground. The words are on the tip of his tongue, this time, but he can’t bring himself to ruin this moment. To make Dirk shut him out again, like he does every time Dave suggests it. They both know he’s right, in the end.

“Let’s go back in. It’s warm, there,” he says instead, and shuffles back into the cave. After a beat, the boy follows, and Dave notices that he doesn’t do much more than scuff their footprints. He squints up at the sky and shrugs. They’ll be covered soon enough, anyway.

\---

He tries again, the night after. They have eight cans of food between them. Dave knows that Dirk doesn’t have more than three more of those bundles hidden away. He has to agree. Dave isn't going to let them both die here, in this miserable cave in the middle of nowhere.

“We need to leave.”

There's no response, but when Dave looks over at the boy, his hands are curled tight into fists. He's looking at what little food they have. Dave knows the calculations he must be running through his head.

“Not yet,” is what he says. It's not a yes, but it's progress. It's as close to agreement as he's likely to get.

“What are you waiting for?”

“We need more. Give me a week.”

“You're leaving again. To- where you went before.”

“Yes.”

“I'm coming with you. We can make it a stop on the way. Spend the night nearby. On the road, even.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Not safe.”

“You go alone.”

“Easier for one person who knows the way. Who knows how to be in and out.”

“How bad is it?”

“Bad.”

“Even the road nearby?”

“Yes.”

Dave sighs, frustrated, runs a hand through his hair. Stubborn boy.

“Let me come at least part of the way. You'll need someone to help you carry things. You can take more that way.”

Silence, as the boy actually seems to think it over.

“Where would we go?”

“South, where it's warmer. Or the coast.”

“Coast,” the boy says, decisive. His tone dares Dave to contradict him- but he doesn't. Frankly, Dave is just relieved that he finally got the boy to agree.

(He doesn't want to think about the boy here alone, freezing or starving or both like he would have done if he'd stayed. If Dave hadn't come along. This, at least, is something he can do. A way to _help_ , finally.)

“Coast it is. Your map go that far?” Dave asks. He knows that his does; he'd ripped the relevant pages from an overpriced gas station tourist trap road atlas, kept them safe ever since. Figured it would be a good idea to have an idea of the bigger picture, even while he was staying with the Lalondes. He'd known even then that they wouldn't be able to stay there forever.

The boy nods slightly. “West.”

“...You wanna go to the West Coast?”

(Tall buildings and star-studded streets and the desperate hopeful flocking there to make it big or be swallowed whole by a city hungry for talent and fame. Cameras flashing in his face and a half-smirk, half-smile, non-expression he used to wear as a mask. An apartment in the good part of town. A home for them both.)

“Southwest. Further from cities.”

This is solid logic, and Dave acquiesces with a nod.

“I'll get my map out. And we go in a week.”

“A week,” the boy echoes, his voice strangely devoid of doubt. Dave watches him watch the cave, rest a hand flat against the stone walls that have housed him for too long.

He looks away soon after though, digging his map out of his backpack. Worn paper neatly folded and creased, careful so as not to tear holes in the corners of the folds. The colours have long since faded, and it's warped from water, but it'll do.

The boy is a warmth at his side as they have a semi-verbal debate about where to go.

\---

The boy is staunch in his refusal to let Dave come with him into the city itself. It's a miracle that he even managed to get as close as the suburbs, sprawling outwards in the husk of a forgotten dream. They stick mostly to the woods still, even when they start to thin out. The boy avoids the roads entirely, though it would be faster. Dave nearly questions him about it, but as they draw closer and hear the distant roar of an engine, growling low in the silence, he bites back any comments.

He's starting to get a sense of just how dangerous these trips might be.

The houses here are run down, previously cleared out and looted of anything even remotely valuable. They are vultures picking at bones already cracked open with the marrow sucked out.

Dave picks one to camp in for the night, right on the fringes of the woods as per the boy’s instructions. Dave isn’t entirely sure about it- it may be easier to get away, but if there's anyone here, anyone patrolling, it's the first place they'd look.

But they haven't seen or heard a thing, and there's no warning markers around. Even if it might be a trap. It's a risk they have to take, but Dave despises it all the same. He’s all too aware of the fact that he cannot protect the boy (that he is fucking abysmal at it, really), not in a world like this. But he doesn't want the boy to get hurt and he doesn't want to let him out of his sight, and his worry gnaws at his stomach, curling his insides to knots. Suddenly, he has so much more to lose, and he doesn't even fully understand how.

They don’t light a fire, and they sleep sequestered away in a room with only one window, on the far end of it, so they can see anything coming. They take turns keeping watch, too. The boy’s face is pale in the darkness, when Dave nudges him awake. His eyes open too quickly for him to have been asleep, but Dave doesn’t bother chastising him for it- does it matter? He won’t fall asleep on his watch, Dave knows.

All the same, his rest is fitful at best. There’s a few quiet coughs, some rustling, before the boy settles down just where Dave was sitting before. The best place to see, but not be seen. Not that anyone would be able to glance in here and make out much from a distance.

Dave wakes as the grey light of dawn filters in through the window, unusually bright without the walls of the cave closing in on all sides. For a single moment, he fools himself into thinking that he’s waking up post-bender on the hard floor somewhere. He wishes it lasts longer, because the moment he sets eyes on the boy, currently rummaging through his pack for something to serve as breakfast, it vanishes. He’s left with a sense of bitter longing, but one that he brushes off as he sits up.

“Anything happen?”

“No.” Dave receives a dry look that tells him this much should be obvious. So much for small talk.

“Breakfast?” he tries again, instead. His stomach gives an approving growl as he lifts a hand to scrub the grit off his eyes.

In response, a can is slid over his way, along with an opener. SPAM. Before, Dave had literally never seen anyone buy a can of this shit, though now he’s immensely thankful for its existence. He opens it, and the grate and spin of the can-opener is the only sound in the morning. He assumes the boy has eaten already, given that he’s awake.

“Where are we going next?” This, said through a full mouth.

“I’m going further in. You’re staying here.”

“Like hell. We’ve been over this before. It’s better with two of us. You’ll have backup in case shit goes sideways.”

“I don’t have time to teach you how to avoid traps and being seen. I know the way in.”

“So, what, I just sit on my ass all day?”

“Yes.”

“Dude.”

“You’re not coming.”

“And what if something happens here, then?” The suggestion feels like challenging fate.

“Then I meet you at the cave.”

“And if something happens to _you_?” It can’t- is the thing. Dave won’t allow it, but here he’s being told that he has no choice.

“You go back if I’m not back by tomorrow night.”

“I’ll still need supplies. I’ll come after you.”

A shrug.

“Fine.”

“So I can come if you don’t get back by then?”

“I’ll be dead if I don’t get back by then. It won’t exactly matter very much to me.”

Again, with the casual statement. Like it doesn’t bother him in the slightest. Dave finds his eyes drawn to the gun that’s still holstered at his side. His fingers itch to take it off, but he knows that the boy wouldn’t let him. Dave doesn’t think about how easily something could go wrong. He doesn’t think about returning to the empty cave, knowing that the boy wouldn’t be there to follow.

“Dirk.”

“What?”

“Don’t say shit like that,” he says, lamely. This earns him the arch of an eyebrow.

“Why not? It’s true.”

Dave shoves the half-eaten can back the boy’s way. Suddenly, he’s not hungry anymore. The boy takes it back without complaint, and proceeds to dig in. Dave bites back a retort about conserving food- it’s not like that would have done particularly well in the open air to begin with. And he knows he wouldn’t have been able to finish it.

The boy seems to take his silence as an agreement, though, and as soon as he’s done licking his fingers clean and draining every drop of liquid (gross) from the can, he sets it down and stands up. Purposeful.

“Here, or by the cave. Tomorrow night as a deadline,” the boy repeats, as if Dave could forget. He doesn’t want to think that the boy believes he will.

He watches the boy go, waits until he’s headed down the road and just out of sight. And then he follows him.

\---

He manages to stay out of sight, trailing far enough behind that he knows the boy can’t hear his footsteps. His heart is pounding; he feels exposed, vulnerable- and he is. His attention is split two ways and that’s a dangerous thing. Half to keep track of the boy, half to scan his surroundings periodically, to stop and look and listen and pay attention to where he’s putting his feet down because surely there’s traps here as they draw closer and closer to the empty husk of the city. Well. Not so empty, if it’s as dangerous as the boy says, as Dave suspects.

It’s a good thing he isn’t going alone, though. He adjusts his backpack and keeps walking.

\---

Fuck. Fuck, fuck _fuck_.

He’s taken a wrong turn in the dying light, must have lost track of the boy somewhere in these winding streets and alleys, and Dave knows with a sinking feeling that he’s lost. He has only a vague idea of how to get out (there’s signs, there’s still road signs, even if some of them are painted over and smeared the familiar brown-red of dried blood. Warnings, to keep out, and likely the only graves the poor souls in questions had), but he knows that has to be enough. It will be enough. What he doesn’t have is any fucking clue about where he should be,and where’s safe for him to stay the night. It- might be a good idea to just keep moving, hope that there’s nobody around (which there is a chance of- they’ll be locked in their compounds. Feasting.). But there’s always patrols, traps, the possibility that someone or something is out there. He thinks he could try to leave when it gets properly quiet, when any roving bands out for the day will have already come back in. He could follow the roads out, make out the dim white letters of signs in the gloom of night, and maybe be back where he started- or at least in a better spot than here, by morning.

But he doesn’t know where Dirk is, and he can’t bring himself to put even more distance between them. Not when he came this far to look after him to begin with. The boy’s stopped somewhere for shelter during the night, he hopes. Somewhere safe, would be better. But Dave can’t stop to worry about the boy now- he should’ve stayed put, should’ve waited for him to come back instead of getting himself into this fucking mess.

No.

He takes a deep breath, painfully aware of how loud it is in the quiet of the little alley he’s tucked himself into. This place isn’t empty, far from it. But it’s dark, now, too dark to tell which buildings are safe and which aren’t, too dark to see any warning markers on the door or recognize any obvious signs of a trap. A neat little place, tucked away in a corner. Windows unbroken, and the door closes, even if there’s no lock. The perfect place for someone desperate. But that’s what happened last time. And that’s not what’s going to happen now.

Dave knows better, he’s been out here, out on the road, for longer. If something seems too good to be true, it is.

(What, then, a small part of him wonders, does that say about the boy’s little set-up in the cave? What kind of favors has he been trading, what has he _done_ to get it? Dave shudders, brushes the thought away. Now isn’t the time.)

He strains his ears, tries to hear the sound of footsteps or voices or _anything_ in the distance. There’s nothing but the thudding of his heart against his ribs, the shallow pants of his breath. Right. He stands up, edges over to the mouth of the alley. It’s safer than going out into the streets blind, but he doesn’t know if it’s a dead end. He can only make out the faintest of shapes in the gloom- the square edge of an overturned dumpster, the rough silhouette of what he thinks is a trash can. A faint gleam of a metal door as it catches the light that’s almost entirely faded, and a yawning darkness where it must lead on to something else.

He ends up curled up just at the edge of that alley, straining his ears all night to listen for the barest sign of someone else’s presence. The only ones he gets are footsteps in the distance, in beat like a drum, and the faint sound of their voices carrying on the ear. That, and the grating screech of a manhole in the distance, blaring through the night. It’s far enough away, but he edges closer towards the wall. He makes it to morning, somehow, and as soon as he can make out more than dim silhouettes, he’s getting up and scrambling out, making sure to stick to the pre-dawn shadows.

\---

He nearly makes it to the suburbs, before he runs into trouble. At first, there’s nothing. No sound, but the quiet thudding of his own footsteps. He doesn’t want to think about what would have happened if he hadn’t turned without stopping, had lost that deep-seated paranoia. Because he sees them, then. Four figures frozen in the road, features indistinguishable but for the red and black smiles painted on. They’re armed. Proper shoes. But they’re not close.

Dave doesn’t think. He runs. He knows the way from here, and maybe he doesn’t know the place as well as they do, but. _But_. There’s no way they’d have had time to set up an ambush. This is what he chooses to believe, and this is why he sprints for the streets instead of just running into the woods first. Not yet, for that. Not yet.

(How long have they been following him stalking him like prey waiting to corner him like a rat in a maze? He remembers running along a flat stretch of road with four others, sprinting as hard as they could with different men and different masks chasing after them. They’d been laughing. Dave hadn’t had enough breath to scream.)

He can hear the footsteps growing loud like thunder but he doesn’t dare look back he can’t afford that waste of time can’t afford to not pay attention to the ground. His lungs burn as he sucks in air, the cloth around his face slipping down to his neck but he doesn’t have the time to readjust it, doesn’t have the energy to spare to anything other than his legs. Think, _think_.

More voices, now. A crackling static, faint. Communication-? Meaning more pursuers. He has to lose these first before they can figure out where he’s going, before he leads them into the woods and straight to the only safe place he knows right now.

He remembers the house they sheltered in that first night and sprints past it, makes a hard left to what he thinks leads to another road sprawling out to the east- he’ll double back or go around but make them think that’s where he’s going-

And then he slams into something solid, gets sent sprawling on his ass. Oh god please be a wall, he chants as he scrambles back to his feet and then he has to stifle a scream because there’s a giant, face smeared with greasepaint in an obscene parody of a smile and he knows that paint knows that pattern, except it’s not, it’s just a mask black and white like ones from the theater and the man(?) is holding a rifle not a nail-studded club designed to tear through flesh. He doesn’t think about getting shot in the back as he goes around and keeps on running. There’s shouting now, he can hear it. Angry voices that sound like growls in the night and whispered taunts and _hold still this will only hurt a lot but it’s for a greater good, it’s us or you and you’re going to be a part of something bigger, something better_. He flinches as something whizzes past his ear, pushes his legs to go faster. He can see the treeline on the side of the huge road he’s on, see the hulking shapes of cars long-stalled and looted and made into a makeshift barrier to the sides.

Another whizz, and this time it’s accompanied by a searing pain in the shell of his ear, something warm dripping down it. With a pang, he realizes that the bullet has grazed him. He ignores the pain and vaults over the hood of a car, landing neatly on the other end. Out of sight for the moment, he crawls on his hands and knees, ignoring the sting of grit digging into his palms as he scrambles to get over that small strip of grassy area and into the trees, proper.

He can hear them, trying to figure out where he is. He pinpoints the moment they spot him, because there’s another shout and this time the splintering of a tree not five inches from his head. Lucky, lucky.

He keeps running, until his legs are threatening to give out but he can still hear them in pursuit, there’s more of them now, isn’t there? Dave knows he can’t keep this pace up for much longer, but he’s not going back to a half-life like that. He’s not going to die like that, not with his flesh slowly carved from his bones as he wastes away in a cage with the rest of the sorry souls who ended up in there with him. Shoving the weak forwards so they’d be whole just that much longer.

There. A tree, roots jutting forwards into what looks like thin air. He almost misses it in his desperation, but he’s out of options. The only thing to do is to jam himself into that gap, even as soil starts to trickle down from the top of his makeshift hideaway and into his hair, his eyes. He knows they weren’t able to see him, before, so maybe and god, he’s praying, that they didn’t see him try to hide here. There’s nowhere to run, after this, but. He doesn’t have time to do much else than smear his coat with handfuls of dirt, do the same with his face. In case anything shows through the roots.

After that, he can only wait, and listen as they circle like vultures around, drawing ever closer.

(Later, he’ll realize that it didn’t even _occur_ to him to try and fight back. But he’ll rationalize it away as him only being able to do something if they got close, and if they got close enough for him to do something, they also would have shot him.  His fingers will curl around the hilt of the broken sword that’s his only weapon, and he’ll shudder at the thought.)

\---

His hands don’t stop shaking until hours after, even as he’s covered in mud and still refuses to move from the spot he’s wedged himself into. Even when the noise dies, instead of a purposeful lull to draw him out. He stays there the rest of the night, until morning, but he doesn’t manage to fall asleep. He’s convinced they’ll come back, still.

But dawn comes, and they don’t, and he knows this is the day where the boy is going to be making his way back to the cave. And he has to be there.

He worms his way out, stands up even though his stiff legs threaten to give out on him, pins and needles erupting almost painfully as he stretches them out. There’s wet clods of dirt in his hair, but he doesn’t mind. If it wasn’t for the rain, he wouldn’t have made it.

Dave picks a direction and starts walking. Away from the road, but he thinks parallel to it. His feet do the rest.

It takes him a day and a half to get back. The boy takes one look at him and points outside in a silent demand he rinse himself off, but Dave can see the relieved slump of his shoulders. It warms something inside him in a gentle glow, and he doesn’t protest as he turns right back around, cold and caked with dirt. He can’t exactly blame the boy for wanting him clean, after all.

He gives in and dunks himself in the pool, and Dirk’s eyes burn holes into the back of his head all the while. Dave doesn’t attempt to say anything once they’re back in the cave, doesn’t bother to eat before he curls up and falls asleep almost instantly, his hair and skin still damp. There’s the vague feeling of slim fingers carding through his hair, lightly, but it doesn’t do more than make him stir. The touch feels phantasmal.

When he wakes up the next morning, there’s an extra blanket draped over him.

\---

Unpacking, and the boy has somehow managed to accumulate an unbelievable amount of sheer crap somehow. The way you do when you’ve settled into a place long enough to call home. Dave remembers how long the boy said he’d been here for, how comfortable he is in these woods and how good he is at making those trips into the city unseen. Or at least unscathed.

He’d feel almost guilty for leaving, but he knows it’s not sustainable to stay. And even though the boy might have stayed and starved or frozen if Dave hadn’t come, he’s here to make sure that doesn’t happen. His brother is going to survive, come hell or high water, and Dave knows that he’ll do anything to make that happen.

He lets his eyes drift over to where the boy is sorting the items he has. Electronics, cans, three empty bottles. Blankets, a jacket. A scarf that’s entirely lost its color and pattern. Gloves, worn fingerless. Socks. And then there’s four whole rolls of tape.

“There is no way you need that much duct tape. Where’d you even get all that shit? Did you just have it lying around because you decided to start fuckin’ hoarding it?”

The boy ignores him, and continues to put roll after roll of the damn stuff into his backpack, until it bulges.

“You can’t carry that much, and we need the space for more important things. Food, for example.” He tries again.

“It’s useful.”

“You don’t need it.”

“And we can only take what we need?”

“Yes.”

“Then I should go alone, by all accounts,” the boy says, and Dave flinches.

“You wouldn’t,” is all he manages in response, his voice tight. “You would rather stay here and freeze to death.”

“I wouldn’t freeze if I stayed.” There’s something strange in his voice, a bitter twist to his lips. Like he’s laughing at a joke Dave doesn’t know yet. He finds that he doesn’t at all like that look.

“You would.”

“I would starve first, actually.”

“Because that’s better?”

“I wouldn’t feel it, either way. I’d be too weak to move, and with the cold I would fall asleep and simply not wake up.” He slants a glance at Dave out of the corner of his eye. “Don’t look like that. It’s better than what you might be leading us to.”

That isn’t something Dave can argue against. He doesn’t say anything else about the duct tape, but he’s sure to squeeze out a bit more room in his own pack, for food. They’ll take everything they can carry. And anything they can find along the way.

The boy clears his throat a few times, as if to speak again, but he never does.

\---

They leave with the next snow since the sudden dip in temperatures, the flakes falling thickly around them and erasing their footprints as they head out of the cave. Supplies carefully packed, masks on, shoes and jackets and blankets and every goddamns scrap of cloth or anything remotely warm they could manage. It’s only going to get worse from here.

The boy doesn’t stop, doesn’t look back at the cave that had been as close to home as he’d gotten since everything went to shit. Dave spares a moment only to tear down the tarp that had served as concealment and insulation. He rests a hand against the chill stone before he pulls away entirely, slate grey and worn like the rest of them, the surface slightly pockmarked and marbled. It was a good shelter. Hopefully it’ll serve someone else, after they’re gone.

“Let’s go,” comes a quiet command. Dave looses a sigh, watches his breath turn to a cloud in miniature.

“Yeah.”

They walk.

It takes three days for them to leave the woods properly, with Dave having a newfound appreciation for their full scale. The boy insists they avoid paths and the edge closest to the road. Dave doesn't dispute the point. He remembers how they had to run, how it was easier to lose those men in the trees. Out on the road, they wouldn't stand a chance. And they both know the bloodcult is still out there. Too close for comfort. Dave isn't sure whether or not he's disgusted by how close the boy lived to them, or proud of him for existing just under their noses, in their territory, technically, even if it isn't patrolled here.

The snow falls around them for most of the first, freezes solid by the second. Turns to slush they have to muddle through, by the third.

They're on the road, by the fourth, and Dave doesn't recognize this as the one he came with. But it's different directions, after all. And there are no sounds, no distinct engine growls in the distance. Nothing but him and the road (and the silence that presses against his ears and threatens to swallow him whole) and the boy. Who hangs back, eyeing the paved surface with the look of an animal about to bolt. Or so Dave attempts to recall from a memory of a nature documentary.

But eventually, he puts his feet on the tarmac and starts walking, a ghost silently treading right behind Dave. He doesn’t try to talk, and Dave doesn’t bother with attempting conversation. He’s fallen into old habits, periodical scans of his surroundings. Pauses to listen for footsteps or engines or voices or anything that’s not silence or a sound the two of them are making. It’s even more important, now that he knows exactly how close they are to that city and everything that lurks inside.

Even when the light dims, the boy keeps walking. Dave wonders if he knows if there’s any shelter around, but as the hours go by and he doesn’t stop, not until it’s pitch black and they can barely see each other, it’s clear that he doesn’t.

Dave makes them stop, leave the road and step to the side where there’s the usual small hill studded with either trees or grass. It’s not ideal, but it’s enough to hide them from the view of anyone on the road. There won’t be any fires tonight.

They eat in silence, but Dave isn’t sure how much either of them sleeps.

\---

They wake up with the first change of light, stiff and cold. Hungry, too. Dave encourages the boy to eat, the boy refuses to unless they split a can between them. It’s an acceptable compromise, he thinks; even now, they have to think about saving food. Saving as much as possible.

They rise from whatever little hole or overhang they managed to find from the night- the boy started to scout ahead, ranging far and often out of Dave’s sight, but never for too long. Neither of them wants to be scrambling for a place to rest when it gets dark and they can’t see more than an inch in front of their own faces. They could use lights, Dave knows; the boy had managed to scavenge up a set of batteries that worked on his last trip. But that would be akin to sending up a flare, even if Dave doesn’t think that there’s anyone particularly close by. All the same, it’s not a risk he’s willing to take. Not with the boy.

He always doubles back, checks in within an hour. They don’t stop for lunch. Sometimes they talk quietly, but it’s mostly Dave who speaks. It’s strange to have an audience this time, stranger still to have one that speaks as infrequently as the boy. But he’s answering more often, offering up quiet conversation when they settle in for the night in a place of his selection and Dave’s approval.

They only manage to risk a fire a few times, even when the nights start to get colder. Hot dinners are a luxury they can’t afford. It becomes more of a necessity than anything else, to curl in close to one another beneath the thin blankets they share. Just like it becomes a necessity to eat less. One can a day each, to one between them both. Dave lets the boy eat first- the road is wearing on him, he’s not used to this much walking. Long days of nothing, dead silence interrupted only by their voices, when they dare to speak. A tension that draws out over weeks as they constantly look over their shoulders for whatever other revenants are roaming the earth. He falls asleep first, and Dave follows in a light doze.

And then they do it all over again. This is how the days pass.

\---

Nearly three weeks in, with half their food gone and that only thanks to careful rationing on both their parts, it starts to hail. And then rain, ice cold and half-slush. And doesn’t stop.

They slog through the sheets of water for the better part of a day, desperate for shelter. Their usual makeshift camps won’t work- they need something with a roof, Dave knows. And they can’t stay on the road, not when they can’t see or hear anything with great lashes of water flung at them like miniature arrows by the wind, stinging their cheeks. Soaking them to the bone as the temperature starts to drop, numbing noses and fingers and toes in worn shoes that are threatening holes. Dave has to grab hold of the boy to stop him from going ahead, from trying to find shelter. He won’t be able to make his way back, in this.

When the boy reaches up to grip his hand, lace their fingers almost bruisingly tight together, Dave doesn’t say anything.

They find shelter in a rest stop nearly an hour later, a shambling collection of four buildings already swiped clean of everything valuable, aside from their roofs. The boy pauses, skims them all over, and chooses one on the far end of the complex. Dave has no idea what logic he’s using, but trusts that it’s sound. It’s the one he would have gone for, anyway. It’s the furthest from the faint lights glowing through broken windows in some of the others, a reminder that they’re not alone. Potential danger mellowed out by mutual suffering. He’s sure there’s something poignant about it, but Dave is far too fucking wet and cold to lend himself to philosophical discussions.

(Dirk had been getting into that kind of thing, had been interested in the hows and whys and the ‘Big Questions’ of life. Dave remembers being posed with an almost frighteningly nihilistic, ‘If we’re all going to die and nothing is going to remain after the universe also dies, why do I have to clean my room?’ when the kid was six. It’s one of the longest sentences he’d spoken at that age, Dave’s sure. He hazards a glance at the boy, half-longing for him to wax eloquent on how to find meanings in even the smallest of things, but Dirk remains silent.)

There’s things deemed useless- bits of newspaper and magazine still here, and that’s enough for them to light a fire with, and huddle close. Even the clothes in their packs are wet, but they’re nowhere near as soaked through as the ones they wore today. Dave looks away as the boy strips, toes off his shoes, lays everything out to dry. He does the same, but grabs the driest blanket in his pack and a can for dinner.

“More beans,” he says, as he works it open. The boy shakes his head slightly, shivering.

“Not hungry.”

Dave frowns. Hungry or not, he needs to eat.

“I’ll eat in the morning, if you leave some,” the boy adds, his voice nearly silent and a little strained. Dave figures he’s just stifling a yawn, with how his hand moves up to hide it. Skipping a meal is never a good idea, but the boy is going to eat in the morning, and that’s enough to mollify him for now. Dave will push a little extra his way to make up for it.

When they wake up, it’s still raining and miserable. Dave makes sure the boy eats his share, and he does. Neither of them minds a day of rest, but they curl up in the corner furthest from the windows and keep the fire as dim as possible. The boy ventures a suggestion about covering them up, blacking them out at night, but Dave shakes his head. It’d mean less blankets for them at night, when the rain is going to turn to snow.

It’s that night, where he notices the boy start to cough harder. But Dave’s dealing with a tickle in his own throat, and his nose is running, so he doesn’t think too much of it. Must have been the rain.

They leave two days later, step into the damp world and start walking again. They don’t see anyone else who must have taken shelter there, and Dave is grateful for it.

\---

They’re running low on food. Three cans left between them both, and Dave knows- he _knows_ he has to make the boy take most of it. He won’t lose him again. Not to this.

But they’ll find more in the meantime, he has to believe that.

Dirk doesn’t tell him he’s being childish, and he thinks that the boy is hoping it as much as he is. They start ranging off the road, looking for something, anything. Hidden stashes, little houses along the roadside that start to appear as they drift closer to what must have been a city. It’s dangerous to get too close, but they’re going to starve if they don’t.

When there’s one can left, they smell something cooking in the distance, see the haze of smoke rising a few hundred feet away. And then they hear the screaming. The smell thickens and sours into the stench of too many bodies in a makeshift cage, each desperate and hungry and so, so scared. His hands shake, as he starts to back away.

They walk, then run, in the other direction. Dave doesn’t notice that there’s tears streaming down his face, not until they’re far enough away that they can’t even see the thin plume of smoke or hear or smell anything- even if he can feel it clinging to him, coating the inside of his nose and mouth and the back of his throat. The boy has to guide him to small rock formation, settle him under an overhang. Dave’s barely aware of where he’s putting his feet; even with the danger gone, the memory feels all too real. Everything in him is telling him to run, further and faster so that won’t happen again because he _knows_ it’s not real, but he can still smell burnt flesh and see dim shapes in the half-light they’d been kept in. His breath catches in his throat as he practically falls on his ass, curling up tight. Fuck. _Fuck_.

“Breathe,” comes the quiet command, and he does automatically. There’s hands on his shoulders, but they’re not trying to push him towards the front, not trying to do anything but hold him. Dave takes the breaths, gulps down air and that helps, more than he’d like to admit. The image of the boy is hazy in front of him, but he can see his mouth moving, counting out- breaths? Something? In a slow, even beat. Dave tries to follow it, he really does.

He can hear the quiet reassurances the boy offers, once his breathing is normal. Once those dry-heaving sobs have stopped, and he has the strength to lift his hands and rest them on the boy’s, squeeze lightly. He feels the slight pressure of a squeeze in return.

“I’m okay,” he finally manages to rasp out. He knows where he is, and what’s going on. He’s safe, here. Dirk’s here. There’s the sky above him and cold ground underneath and nothing but relatively clean air to breathe in.

“You’re not,” the boy says. But he doesn’t offer anything else, just settles down next to Dave. Slots in against his side. There’s a pull against his sleeve, and then an arm wrapped around his shoulders, and he’s being carefully maneuvered into a half-embrace, with a too-thin arm draped around him, and his head tucked awkwardly against the boy’s shoulder.

He sighs, but lets his eyes drift shut. Just for a moment. The boy doesn’t ask about what just happened, and Dave is thankful for it. He doesn’t want to talk about it, doesn’t want to think about it. He wishes he didn’t remember every second of it in excruciating detail, wishes that he didn’t entirely lose his shit at the sound of a gun or the sight of blood or even the thought of hurting someone else.

(He can’t remember a time when he _wasn’t_ like this, is the problem. There is no Before, for this.)

Dave knows the boy isn’t necessarily comfortable with this much contact, for this long, but Dirk doesn’t move away, so Dave doesn’t try to, either. He’ll take whatever meagre comfort he can get from this situation. They don’t talk, and neither of them can manage to eat more than a few spoonfuls of the can the boy fishes out of their backpack. Tuna, apparently. They’ll save it for the morning.  He’ll feel better in the morning.

Neither of them sleep well that night. But they don’t talk about it the next morning. Or the one after that.

\---

There’s a town coming up. Houses rising as little smears on the horizon, bleached of color in this half-light. They ate the last can between them for breakfast yesterday. Already, he knows they’re both hungry. But this is a manageable beast. Dave will manage- he has to.

Dave doesn’t want to risk it, going into those houses and that tangled maze of streets. Only ghosts and monsters live there, but that’s no dissuasion for the desperate. And they are desperate. They’ve been since the food starts running low, but now that it’s gone, things are worse. The boy turns to detour towards them, and Dave doesn’t stop him. He just follows, silently, and keeps his eyes open for anything that doesn’t belong as they draw closer and closer to a place that might be their salvation, or their undoing.

The main road they end up on is desolate and empty. There’s only a few cars around, old and rusted. The boy scans the squat buildings with signs that were once cheerful encouragements, and picks the grocery store, first. Dave knows better than to hope that there’ll be anything edible, but he hopes they find something else that’s useful, at least.

It’s eerie, when they step in. Dark but for the weak shafts of light that filter in through broken windows but fail to reach the backs of those corridors that stretch too long. Empty shelves line them, caked with dust and flaking smears of darkness dried on. Dave looks away- he doesn’t need the light to know what that is.

There’s absolutely nothing here. Not on the shelves, not in the little storeroom in the back, not behind the counter or even in any of the drawers the boy yanks open with increasing force. Dave just sighs. As much as he’d expected, then.

(He remembers huge, cavernous buildings devoted to just food, stocked to the brim with any and everything you could want to eat. His mouth waters at just the thought, and he closes his eyes for a second, just so he can pretend to see gleaming cans and vegetables and fruits as bright splashes of color under harsh fluorescent lights. Free samples. Milk, juice, cheese. Entire chickens, spinning on a spit and browned and delicious, dripping with juices.)

They move on, look through all the other buildings that might have something. They manage a single stick of jerky from the pharmacy, wedged between two shelves. They only get it because the boy had insisted on moving one to look. It’s a meagre reward.

Dave makes them move on when the shadows start to lengthen. Pushes them towards the outskirts, with houses that are more likely to be unoccupied. They spend the night in one, nibble on the jerky and pass it between them for dinner. At least they still have water, from the rain. At least there’s that.

They leave the next day, stomachs growling.

\---

Another town, a day later.

The same story, except they manage to find a forgotten jar of pickles in the pantry of one of the houses. There’s only two left, and that’s dinner. Dave winces as the sour brine stings his throat, but he drinks it all, licks his fingers clean, afterwards.

He dreams about going to a restaurant, that night, except the waiter’s face morphs into a painted-on smile and eyes that burn with hunger and madness. He wakes up in a cold sweat, has to shift closer and wrap himself around the boy to calm the pounding of his heart.

\---

The third. Two days more, and Dave feels like his head is stuffed with cotton, his limbs too light. It’s nothing he can’t handle, he tells himself. He’s gone without for longer. He can last for longer, before they find something. And they will. They have to.

\---

The boy is staggering, by the time they get to the next town. They’ve been walking less and less, every day. Dave knows that it won’t be long before they can’t move for very long, at all. As it is, he knows their bodies are already turning against themselves to eat. Breaking down muscle and everything it can to survive.

They have to stop and rest too often. Out in the open. The boy’s eyes are wide behind his shades, his cheeks hollowed out and sunken in. His fingers are skin drawn taut over bone. Dave isn’t in as bad shape- but he was bigger, to begin with. He’s used to this, even if it hasn’t happened in a while. It’s not something he can forget, after all.

Dave takes the boy’s hand to steady him, and it’s a testament to how tired, how weak they both are that he doesn’t protest.

Everything is empty, of course. But the layers of dust are disturbed. Someone’s been here, recently. Dave herds the boy into an empty house, where they both collapse in a windowless room to sleep as the sky outside just starts to dim. The boy’s legs tangle with his own. He’s shivering, trying to clear his throat. Dave drags another blanket over the two of them, wraps Dirk up in his arms to stay warm.

His shoulders shake a little still, his breathing is labored. But it evens off into sleep, and Dave follows soon after, dreading tomorrow and the hollow pit in his stomach.

The boy is gone, when he wakes up. The initial twinge of panic is an old friend. There’s no note, but if someone else had come in, he’d know. Dawn’s starting to seep through the sky as the barest fingers of lighter grey permeating dark, angry clouds.

The boy isn’t in the house, and Dave feels dread start to settle cold in his chest. He knows that his brother isn’t far- he’d have said, otherwise, woken Dave. So he checks the backyard, a miserable sprawl that was once a lawn. And that dread strengthens, as he watches the boy stare at the ground. And start to dig.

A few small holes already dot the ground, the earth dark and damp.

“No.”

The word flies from his mouth before he can even think to stop himself.

“We need-,” the boy says.  His voice is frustratingly, even, even as he sinks his fingers into the dirt, claws out another handful.

“No,” Dave repeats, and he can hear that sharp, brittle tone. Like glass shattering. He doesn’t even notice how he crosses the yard in two long strides, yanks the boy away from the hole. The hunger gnaws at him, but. He knows what the boy was looking for, in this place where not even insects would be found, or worms or anything living. He knows they’re desperate, but. Not that. Anything but that.

The boy’s jaw is set, his eyes narrowed, and Dave can feel how thin his arm is. Belatedly, he gentles his grip.

“We’re not doing that, we’re _not_. We can’t.” They’re not like that. They can’t be. His stomach churns at the thought, and he has to fight the urge to dry heave and gag.

“Why not.”

“We’re better than them,” he says, and only when the boy flinches back does Dave notice that he’d nearly shouted it.

“Not if we’re dead.” The boy isn’t looking at him, now.

“We’ll find something else in time,” Dave replies with all the conviction he no longer feels.

“There was nothing here, anyway.”

Dave is thankful for that much, at least. But he doesn’t try and talk to the boy for the rest of the day. Or the night, where they huddle against a small hill a little away from the road.

(He remembers Dirk eating when he was told to, Before. Often what he was told to. He’d known better than to waste food, even when they’d had more than enough for them both. Even when Dave had no idea of what was actually in cupboards, he could rest assured that there was something there. He misses those days with a fierce ache.)

He barely hears the whisper that comes just before he goes to sleep.

“I didn’t want to. But I had to.”

The thought simmers sickly in his head even when he sleeps, colors his dreams of reanimated corpses and a mouth full of jagged bone, red-wet and bleeding as it smiles.

They don’t talk about it, in the morning.

\---

They get lucky in the end, with the food. That’s all it comes down to.

There’s an overturned truck on the road- one of those Army Jeeps that can last through everything, apparently, even if they guzzle gas and make far too much noise roaring along the road. The driver’s not far away, of course, but he’s been pitched through the front glass and has landed like a cut marionette on the road a few feet away. Blood gleams darkly on the asphalt, and Dave feels bile rise in his throat at the sight of it. The boy doesn’t seem bothered in the slightest. He kneels by the corpse, even _touches_ it, and Dave has to turn away at that.

The memory of the boy on his knees in the yard is too fresh.

He walks around the back, and nearly falls to his knees. Stored there are- well. Cans. Packets of other shit. Batteries, he thinks. Blankets folded in a corner. Two good jackets. An assortment of small electronics that the boy would maybe like, but that they don’t have room to carry. Two guns and some bullets. A portable radio. Actual, bottled water.

Everything they could ever need. Maybe this is whoever had been in the town, before they came. He doesn’t care.

He opens his pack and starts stuffing as much as he can into it. Food first, as much as he can carry. There’s a small bottle of aspirin, which he takes, and some gauze. The water goes in next, and he crams in a handful of batteries. The radio, he leaves. He knows who he’s taking from, saw the sigils painted into the side of the truck, and he doesn’t give a shit. They can starve, and everyone like them, but he knows they won’t.

There’s already some cans missing, and a door swaying ajar. Dave doesn’t pay attention to it- he can’t afford to think too hard about that beyond a feeling of relief, for  whoever it was that got away and took what they could.

The boy joins him a few minutes later, and Dave pretends not to notice that he’s now wearing the corpse’s jacket, smeared with blood and torn in some places as it is. He doesn’t say anything, just joins Dave in filling his back as much as possible. He ignores the electronics entirely in favour of crawling into the truck, like he’s looking for something specific. Dave frowns, but doesn’t say anything, just glances around, his foot tapping with nervous energy. It’s dangerous to stay too long- others will come. Either to retrieve the lost supplies, or to claim them for their own. Neither are a group that he wants to meet with some of the stolen goods stuffed into his pack. He grabs one of the jackets in there for himself, shrugs out of his ragged one and leaves it on the side of the road. There’s nothing in the pockets, anyway. The new one is considerably warmer, cleaner. He thinks it might be somewhat waterproof, too.

“What are you looking for?” he asks, quiet.

“First aid.”

“Took aspirin already. Found gauze.”

“Trucks should have a kit of their own.”

“Why d’you need it?”

“Supplies are good to have.”

“Hurry up, then. Others are gonna come looking.”

“Ten more minutes.”

“Five.”

“Fine.”

In the end, the boy doesn’t find what he’s looking for, but he’s sliding out just before the five minutes are up. He’s taken one of the blankets to fashion it into a sling to carry more, but there’s only a few more cans inside it.

They detour into the woods for a while in silent agreement to avoid the road and whoever might be on it, picking the corpse and the car clean. Dinner that night is more than they’ve had to eat in a month, even if they don’t manage to find anywhere particularly comfortable to spend the night.

Dave falls asleep to the quiet sound of muffled coughing and the hushed rustling of branches around them.

\---

The next weeks see them walking across long, flat plains gone barren. These used to be fields, Dave thinks, fingering the ash-grey leaf of a stunted growth that crumbles to dust at his touch. It leaves a smear of black against his fingers.

He wipes it off, and keeps walking. Dave figures they have to be somewhere in what used to be the Midwest, which is now impossibly _more_ of a godforsaken no man’s land than it was Before. He makes a quip that at least there’s no more Children of the Corn to worry about, on the first day, and he manages to get a smile out of the boy. It works more often, now. Neither of them mention that the Children of the Corn would probably be the only ones that would have managed to survive whatever purge came after people realized just how bad things were going to get. And that they weren’t going to get better.

Dave shifts closer to the boy, lets their shoulders nudge together briefly. Reminding himself that the boy made it out, too.

They’ve managed to find shelter in the barns that dot the landscape sporadically, too far away from pretty much anything else to be a trap. There’s just old hay that serves for a bed, and a roof over their heads, and that’s enough. And dust, of course, enough that sends them both into coughing fits when they first get in. Thick layers of the stuff that they sometimes have to clear out as best they can, though Dave does most of the work on that count. The boy can’t stand to be in it for too long.

They haven’t seen or heard from anyone on this stretch of road, flanked as it is by deadlands on either end, and the openness, the lack of trees and of cover, is unnerving. The withered, petrified remains of the last growth of plants only comes up to Dave’s knee. They stick out, painfully obvious to anyone who so much as looks in their general direction from a distance. Dave doesn’t like it.

The boy doesn’t, either; he’s restless and fidgeting at best, sticking close to Dave’s sides. He rarely goes off on his own to scout, anymore, and is constantly looking over his shoulder. Dave tamps down any irritation at the habits- for someone used to the cover of trees surrounding them, this is an entirely new environment. With entirely new dangers. But Dave knows that it only comes down to who sees who first.

And even as the shadows lengthen and a chill wind blasts them, they see nothing. Day after day after day.

\---

The latest in a series of old barns, this one reeking of mold. Dave’s concerned it might come down around their heads. The boy doesn’t care. He settles in the place closest to a small hole in the wall, heaves in a deep breath. His shoulders shake slightly.

Dave looks away.

It’s bitterly cold tonight, it’s been snowing intermittently through the day. Flakes have settled heavy in their hair, against their coats. Soaking them through.

“Fire?” the boy asks, his voice thick.

“Should we?”

Dave eyes the hole in the wall, pointedly. It’d be a beacon to anyone around, that there was someone here. He’s not sure it’s a risk he wants to take. Snow blows in from the hole, as if to emphasize his point.

“Yeah.”

“Can we even get anything to light in here? Everything’s damp.”

“Some tinder in the pack. Maybe some gauze?” the boy’s tone is hesitant. Everything in Dave balks at the thought of burning cloth, anything that could be used as an extra layer, for less than an hour of flame.

“We shouldn’t.”

“Are you sure?”

Dave frowns, squinting at the boy in the darkness. The wind picks up outside, and he can only see the faint outline of the boy’s shape. Shoulders curved in, leaning against the wall. A flash of teeth, as he speaks.

“Yeah. We can huddle instead, if we have to. Don’t want to attract attention, and soaking through a blanket trying to cover that up isn’t worth it.”

“Okay.”

“Dinner?”

“A little.”

A muffled- something, swallowed up by the sound of the wind. 

They stay there for three days, as snow piles up outside. Dave has to allow the sacrifice, before they freeze. Nobody is going to be outside in this weather, anyway. No one who intends to stay alive, anyway.

\---

The boy coughs, again. His mouth gleams wetly in the darkness.

“Dirk.”

“It’s fine.” His voice is hoarse, and Dave tells himself it’s from disuse, from all that shit in the air that their makeshift gas-masks can’t filter out.

“You need to eat.”

“Not hungry.”

\---

They find shelter late, stumbling through the pitch black of the night, hands clutched tight so as not to lose one another- here, they cannot risk calling out, and so they cannot risk letting go.

The boy’s hand is small in his, ice cold and slick from the sleet that has been pouring on them in a low, stinging drizzle for the past two days. Dave smooths his thumb across protruding knuckles, absent as they carefully pick their way down treacherous ground to the little dry overhang that the boy swore he’d seen earlier, in the last of the daylight. It’s a ways off the road, and further forward that Dave would have liked to go in this weather, but they cannot walk through the night. The boy said that no one would see it unless they fell down it. Which doesn’t give much credence to his explanation of its discovery. Either way, Dave isn’t always inclined to believe that sort of thing- when people are desperate, they find a way- but when they get there, it’s empty. And, most importantly, it’s dry.

He bundles the boy in first, and Dirk scoots back as Dave crawls in. The boy wordlessly pushes a small pile of still damp wood towards him. Must have stowed it here before he came back. Dave isn’t sure that he can get it to kindle as it is, and so he motions for the boy to pass over his pack. In it is a half-full jar of kerosene, one which they’ve been using sparingly.

The boy ignores this, and removes the jar himself to unscrew the lid with careful hands and pour out just a little over the wood. Enough to get it started, and hope that they can hold a flame without it. The boy also pulls out a lighter- one of multitudes Dave’s since learned he carries around, and holds it to the slick wood. It ignites in a huff of air and a flash of light as flame flickers to life. They both watch it intently, and though it sputters and dims when the kerosene is burnt out, the wood catches.

A sigh of relief.

The boy holds his hands out to warm them, his eyes drifting shut for a moment. Dave studies the planes of his face, the scant padding of layers that provides them protection from the cold and wet. It isn’t enough, he knows. But it will have to be.

“Take your shoes off,” he instructs, and the boy’s eyes slit open. His fingers are stiff, Dave can tell, and he sorely hopes that isn’t a tinge of blue at their tips. But his hands are soon out of sight, the lengths of tarp and sodden cloth wrapping his feet stripped off, and his worn-out shoes along with them. All spread out by the fire to dry. His shades go on again, as Dave does the same with his own shoes.

The boy inspects the soles of his own. “Needs more tape.”

“What do you have for dinner?” Dave changes the topic. He’s come to recognize that way of gloating, recently.

“Beans, corn, peaches. Beyond stale crackers. Tomatoes. You?”

“Beans, corn, apples. Spam, pickles. Canned peppers. Which do you want?”

“Not hungry. I’ll-,” he breaks off, just as Dave is about to protest, and doubles over. Dave sits up almost immediately, shuffling over to him. He’s coughing. Who wouldn’t be, in this weather? It’s the weather, of course. It has to be. Dave’s felt a tickle in the back of his throat, too.

He’s been coughing since the cave in the forest.

“Dirk.”

“It’s fine.” His shoulders are shaking again, the coughs wracking his body. He’s too thin again, his cheekbones gaunter. He needs to eat. He won’t ask for help, won’t ask Dave for anything.

(He stopped asking, Before. Even when he could have had anything, except maybe what Dave should have given him then.)

Dave reaches over, plucks the boy’s shades off his face and presses the flat of his hand against the boy’s back to steady him. Dirk’s eyes are luminous in the dark, wide and like suns in miniature, rising and setting orange bleeding into amber. Dave removes his own, and he feels vulnerable to the bone without them, flayed bare and exposed in the dying firelight.

“Dave,” the boy murmurs, his voice shaky and hoarse. It feels like a shot to the chest.

He doesn’t answer, just leans in. Slow, careful. His heart pounds in his chest, he can feel it in his throat. The boy’s hand extends, flattens over his cheek, coarse with hair, and Dave can feel the tentative pressure of his fingers. They’re skeletal, and Dave tries not to think that they’re the hands of someone already dead, stiff with cold.

Their noses brush, lightly. He can hear Dirk’s breathing, strained and a little ragged, his exhalations soft peals. Dirk isn’t moving back. He swallows, mouth suddenly dry, but he leans forward. Presses their lips together, in that darkest of nights.

Time slows to a crawl, then stops.

There is only the soft pressure against his mouth. The hand on his cheek is shaking. Dirk’s eyes slide shut as he parts his lips, slightly. They’re wet against Dave’s own, and they fit together perfectly. Ever so carefully, he draws his boy closer, arms sliding around him. Sharing the warmth they both need and want so desperately.

(Dirk tastes like blood. He can’t pretend, any longer.)

\---

Dave wakes first to a weight on his chest, warm and comfortable. He startles, hand going for the knife that he keeps under his pillow on instinct. Until his eyes crack open into the dun light, and he’s met with- hair. And the light, raspy snores, close by.

The boy. Dirk.

Dawn is still a way off, he thinks, though he knows that he won’t fall back asleep this time. It’s unusual for him to be awake before the boy, and there’s a nudge of hard-learned experience that tells him to get up, scout around. Things can change, during the night.

But his body is lax and lazy now, as it hasn’t been since the indolent days that marked his Before, and Dave remains as he is, basking in a moment that grows and stretches, like elastic being pulled taut. It has to snap, of course, but. Not yet. Not yet.

\---

“Dirk. You need to eat.”

“Not hungry.”

Dave manages to coax him into eating half a can. He keeps it down, but his shoulders shake in repressed coughs. When he speaks a quiet thanks, his throat sounds rubbed raw. He goes to sleep early, that night.

\---

The map says they’re almost there.

Dave doesn’t know what he should think about, in terms of After. But that’s fine. They can stay as long as they want. It’ll be nice. Idyllic.

(Before, Dave would have scoffed and said that this was the equivalent of retiring in Florida and spending the rest of his days staring senilely out to the sea. He would have thought that staying there with a sullen Dirk and nothing but the roar of the ocean to distract him would be fucking miserable. Now, it sounds like bliss. Peace. Quiet.)

“It’ll take two more days, and then we’ll be there,” he tells Dirk that night, when the boy’s curled in close against his side. They’ve scoped out a place in the shell of a tourist-trap town, the kind that pops up more and more as you get closer to the seaside. They’ll veer south, after this. He traces the route out on the map, points out where they’ll be avoiding the areas that used to be populated.

The boy nods against his chest, taps lightly at the stretch of coastline he’d picked out. He’s been talking less, lately. Trying to preserve his voice. Or maybe he knows that it’s difficult for Dave to hear how he sounds, words thick and a little slurred sometimes, often interrupted by bouts of coughing he tries so hard to keep quiet.

“We’ll need to stick around here. Look for more food.” The words are murmured against the fabric of his shirt, and Dave nods a little. There won’t be too much where they’re going, even if that means there won’t be anyone else there. If they’re lucky.

“Yeah. Dunno if we’ll find too much, though.”

“Think there’s gonna be more by the beach?” A brief pause, the boy turning away. Dave stares up at the wooden beams of the ceiling as he coughs, the sound staccato-sharp and echoing. He waits until it’s over to keep talking. Dirk doesn’t like it much when Dave coddles him, though he accepts the way Dave leans his cheek against lank blonde hair.

“Where?”

“Houses. Vacation places.”

“Maybe.”

“Should still check here.”

“Yeah.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Mhm.”

That’s it for the night’s conversation, really, but Dave keeps up a quiet stream of chatter, until the boy nods off against him. Then, the words stop falling from his mouth, drying up and withering on his tongue. They taste a little like ash.

The next day, they walk around town. Manage to scavenge up a small packet of jerky, a scarf. He finds a few forgotten cans secreted away in the basement of a house- Dirk is the one who goes down to get it, with Dave waiting and watching the darkness swallow him, and then him emerging again from it.

They spend one more night here, in the same house as before, curled up on a dusty mattress that’s too soft to sleep on.

In the morning they leave, with a fine mist of drizzle seeing them off.

\---

The sea stretches out before them, tinted the same dull grey as everywhere else. A hopeless color. Dirk watches in silence, pale beside him as the breeze ruffles their hair. Dave can taste the salt clinging to them already, briny and mordant.

“We made it,” Dave tells him, digging his bare toes into the cold, coarse sand. It clings to his skin, scraping and harsh like everything else. “What do you think?”

“There’s nothing here,” Dirk answers in the lull between crashing waves. His boy is staring at the sea, though, an expression that Dave wants to parse as hope on his face.

“I know. Do you want to leave?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Dirk shakes his head, his lips pressed tight together. He curls in on himself, concave, his shoulders shaking as he coughs. Dave looks away, waits until he’s done to wrap an arm loosely around his boy, hold him close. He doesn’t say anything about how Dirk’s hand comes away red when he wipes his mouth.

“How long do you want to stay?” he asks instead, voice muffled against Dirk’s hair.

A shrug in response, and his boy burrowing in closer to his warmth. Dave tightens his grip, sighs in a soft puff of air.

“We need to find somewhere to sleep.”

“Mmhm.”

“House?”

“No.”

“Boat?”

“If there’s any.”

“If not.”

“Beach cave?”

“Tides.”

“We shouldn’t camp in the open.”

“Nuh uh. We can do without a fire.”

“No way, man. It’s freezing, out here.” _It’ll make you worse._

“It’s nearly dark, anyway. Not enough time.”

“God forbid we’re _late_ , we can’t get back after curfew,” Dave says, entirely deadpan. Dirk huffs out a raspy laugh, elbowing him in the side, and even though it stings and Dave’s almost certain he’ll bruise from it, it makes something warm unfurl in his chest like a beast stretching lazily by a fire.

“Mind out of the gutter.”

“I’m not sure I’ll survive the disappointment, really.”

“You’ve managed fine without me before. You can do it again.”

“Dirk.”

“It’s true.”

“I don’t want--,” Dave starts, and then stops. He can’t bring himself to say it, but even so. Dirk looks like he understands, his expression remote.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Dirk,” he repeats. “Look at me.”

“We should get going. Try to find a good place to camp and rest for the night.”

“You can’t avoid it forever.”

“I’m not going to,” the boy replies, a bitter twist to his mouth. It makes bile rise in Dave’s throat.

“You’re trying to.”

“Aren’t we all?” Dirk shifts away, puts distance between them as he stands up. His motions are unsteady, lack the confidence and strength they had months ago. Before they left. Dave doesn’t have anything in him to answer, not as his boy stands up, dusts clinging sand off his pants.

 _You can’t go_ , sticks in his throat like a clot, choking him. Dirk doesn’t look back as he takes measured steps in the sand, the water lapping at his bare feet. His footprints are light indentations, washed away almost as soon as he leaves them. Dave is left frozen in the din of the waves crashing to the shore, the noise crowding out everything else from his mind, before he scrambles back to his feet, brushes off coarse and clinging sand with careless hands as he hurries after the boy.

\--

They settle in for the night in an abandoned RV, already turned over on its side and pillaged thoroughly, stripped down to its barest components. Nobody will come to it, there is nothing here that they could want. Dave ignores the boy’s protests and builds a fire- a small thing, banked in a corner so as to hide it from view as best they can. But out here in the open, he knows that when it gets properly dark, they’ll need to put it out.

All the same, the way Dirk huddles close to it, curling in against metal that’s already warm to the touch and practically daring the sparks it spits to settle into his hair and skin, is endearing. It’s worth it, Dave tells himself, though he doesn’t need the reminder. There’s only the quiet crackle of the flames to mask the boy’s labored breaths, the rattling coughs that come so often, now.

“You know,” Dave starts, because he needs to be the one to break this silence. “I think this used to be like, this gorgeous private beach or something. You can tell because there’s not a lot of those weird lifeguard Eiffel Tower wannabe structures. And also because there were all those fancy houses up there on that cliff, overlooking the water. And also because there’s literally jack shit here in the way of supplies, holy shit, we’ll need to go up there and check them out. Tomorrow? Tomorrow might be a good day, if it doesn’t fucking rain and pour some more heavenly wrath on us, like whatever fuckin’ dead god there is up there hasn’t given us enough shit to deal with. Like, sure, why not toss in the goddamn Biblical flood in, too? Ain’t like Noah’s around with his shitty boat, there weren’t any animals for him to hang on to this time around. Though- ha, can you even imagine, dude? We see this fucking boat chock full of animals, and what’s the first thing we’re gonna think? Dinner. That’s exactly what we’re gonna think, though I have no idea how our scrawny asses are meant to take down like, lions and shit. Shit, man, you think the animals ever ate each other on the Ark? Like presumably he didn’t have an entire ecosystem going on in there and he only had like, two of each. Was he making the prey ones like, fuck or something? So he could eat them? That’s fucked up. Jesus Christ.”

“That’s pretty much what’s going on down here, though,” Dirk says, quiet, when Dave’s taking a breath. Truth be told, he’d fizzled out some, but the boy’s words are a sobering truth.

“What are you-?”

“Don’t play dumb. You’ve seen it, too. And I’m not idiot enough to believe that the world is made up of good and bad people. It’s just lucky, and unlucky, and a whole lot of fucking desperation.” He manages to say his piece, but his voice is thick and barely suppressing a cough by the end. Dave rests a hand, light and careful, on his boy’s back. He can feel the ridges and knobs of his vertebrae, valleys and mountains and a topography that he’d like to map properly, if they had the time.

“No, we’re the good guys,” Dave insists, because Dirk’s words sting more than they should. He feels sick. He’s never been desperate enough to consider it. “I’m not saying that either of us are heroes, because we’re not, we haven’t saved anyone, but. We’ve never done anything like that. We’re the good guys.” _We have to be_ , hangs in the air between them, thick and heavy like a water droplet waiting to fall.

The boy just shakes his head, a bitter twist to his mouth and a certainty to the set of his shoulders in the face of what Dave has to admit is his own naiveté.

“If you still think that,” Dirk says, his words slow and deliberately chosen, “then you’re luckier than I thought you were.”

He doesn’t say anything for the rest of the night, not until he falls asleep slumped against the wall, dangerously close to the flames. He doesn’t wake up when Dave lifts him, moves him a little further away from the fire. Bundles him up in the blankets they have, smooth his hair back from his forehead.

He can still hear the echoes of those words as he stares at the slowly dying fire. He needs to put it out, before he sleeps. It seems to whisper them back. Luckier than I thought you were. Guilt claws at the inside of his throat and eyes, twists his stomach. He wonders if Dirk had told him the entire story, the first time he spoke. He wonders if the boy had left things out because Dave was the one listening, or because he couldn’t bring himself to remember. To say it. Maybe he’ll ask in the morning, he thinks, and tosses a handful of sand into the fire. There’s plenty of it, even in here. It hisses as it makes contacts with the flames, which flinch away. He does it again, and again, until there’s only darkness and the faintest whisper of smoke.

Lucky.

\--

Dirk is nowhere to be found, when he wakes up. There is that moment of sheer panic, again ( _ohgodhesdeadhesgone_ ), and his heart bangs into awareness with a jolt of adrenaline that has him tangling in their blankets as he struggles to get up.

His eye catches a small arrow, gouged into the floor near his feet. Right where his shoes are, and where Dirk’s laid. There’s a small scattering of sand there, and just once, Dave allows himself to breathe a sigh of relief. Just outside, surely, on a deserted stretch of beach where there’s not another living thing but the two of them. It’s an isolation he embraces, because it means safety. A fragile, transient thing that should be treasured.

He shoves his feet into his shoes, doesn’t bother gathering up more than a tin of pears- a rare delicacy, for breakfast. He figures he can tempt Dirk into eating with it. He needs the food, after all. Even if they’ll need to go looking for more soon- today, maybe. Tomorrow is more likely.

Dave sees the boy easily; he’s the only other person there, after all, and he’s nothing but a small figure in the distance, walking along the firm, wet sand near the ocean. His shoes and socks are off, Dave thinks, because the surf often surges in to cover his feet. His pants must be rolled up, too.

He looks at peace. Dave settles down in the sand to watch him, just far enough that the most the water does is nudge at the soles of his shoes. Duct-tape enforced, and far more waterproof than they would have been otherwise. He’s inordinately thankful that they’d brought so much bullshit tape to begin with.

Dave remains silent, digs his fingers into the sand until he can feel the grains stick beneath his nails, wet and gritty. The boy doesn’t ever stray so far that Dave can’t see him. He turns, eventually, slowly making his way back up the shore. If Dave wanted to, he could pretend that this was just an overcast day, Before. That they’d taken advantage of it to spend a day at the beach, because the sky looks like it’s threatening rain, and no one else but the surfers would show up- and them, only when it starts to storm.

It feels like they’re the only two people left in the world, like this. He can hear the soft grind of sand beneath the boy’s feet as he draws closer, then the thud of shoes and socks being set down right next to him. Dirk doesn’t sit down, though.

“I’m going in,” he announces, apropos of nothing. Dave tilts his head to eye the water dubiously. The denial is right at the tip of his tongue. It’ll make things worse, it’s freezing cold, do you even know how to swim? The latter is a stupid question- some time between their move to LA and their meeting again in the woods, the boy had learned how. Dave’s seen him swim, his body an elegant line coursing through the water. And he’s been doing better, lately. Like the ocean air has been doing him some good.

(Dave refuses to think that it’s just a lull before the final push, that this is something the boy only wants to do because he knows that soon he won’t be able to. This is one more truth he can’t face. Instead, he wonders if all those old stories about frail Victorian ladies going to the continent or to the sea to recover were actually based on a fact.)

It’s easier to breathe out here.

“I’m not,” Dave answers, after he lets the water touch his finger, branding it searing cold. He also wants to stay to look after their things- someone has to, after all. And refreshing as it is to see the boy shed his usual paranoia, it means that it’s now Dave’s job to keep watch (to be the one looking out for him, for them both, for a change, to be useful and wanted like that).

And he does. Layers of clothes are shed until there’s just Dirk and skin and a pair of underpants that hang too loosely on his hips. Dave can see the hollows between his ribs, the stark prominence of his collarbone. He looks away from the miles of skin on display, from the faded freckles and ugly scars he knows he’s only been offered half-explanations for.

He can guess where and when and what, anyway.

-

Dirk falls asleep before him, that night. Dave doesn’t notice the boy has nodded off at first- he’s quiet still, even though he’s speaking more now than he ever has. But the sight of his head falling down, chin nudging into his chest before he jolts it back up again, is endearing.

(He doesn’t think about Before much, anymore, but he can’t help but remember that precisely the same thing happened on that first plane ride to what used to be LA. Dirk, stubbornly trying not to fall asleep a half hour in, his face formerly plastered against the window.)

He cuts himself off with a huffed laugh, and simply drapes a blanket around the other. He doesn’t want to risk moving him. Doesn’t want to feel just how light he’s become, skin stretched thin over bone and shrinking fast like the desiccated corpses in eternal desert tombs. A far grander burial than anyone here is likely to get.

\--

In the morning, Dirk still isn’t awake, and there’s a visceral twist of panic, a gut-deep knowledge that there’s something wrong. But Dave doesn’t want to think about that, wants to convince himself that the boy is simply tired.

\--

Dirk is so, so frail in his arms, Dave realizes with a start. He’s barely there, feather-light. He can feel bones under skin stretched thin, too close to the surface. His chest feels heavy and hollow, something just waiting to cave in.

“You should eat, keep your strength up,” he says. There’s still a can of soup, congealed to a hard block. But they can afford a fire to heat it, here.

The boy shakes his head. Not hungry.

“You need to eat.” Dave says again, more insistent this time. Because this is just something temporary. A cold. The flu. He shouldn’t have gone swimming, yesterday- Dave didn’t even know that he could swim. The water was too cold, he’d thought to himself, and then ignored it entirely when he’d seen Dirk dive into the surf, swallowed by the roar of white and grey. He’d looked alive.

“Won’t be able to keep it down. That’s just a waste.” Dismissive, the boy shakes his head.

“And what are you saving it for, huh?” Dave wants to grab him by the shoulders, shake him. Scream, even, if he didn’t give a shit about being heard. There’s a tremor in his fingers, and he curls them tight against the threadbare blanket on his lap.

The boy doesn’t answer that.

Dave feels sick to his stomach. He can’t deny it anymore.

“I’m dying,” Dirk finally says, his words more an exhale than anything else. And each one of them feels like a punch in the gut, feels like being chained up and carved to pieces all over again, feels like that time he was four and fell out of a tree, falling, falling, and then a sickening crunch before pain. He’d thought he was dying, then. But really, he didn’t know what dying really felt like. And he still doesn’t, not really.

“I know.”

The boy opens his mouth, to say something else. But nothing comes out, just more coughs in hoarse, sharp staccato. It lasts longer than the rest, nearly two minutes. When he stops, his mouth is bright red, and Dave’s chest is cracking, caving in on itself under the weight of the truth he can’t deny anymore.

“I’m sorry,” Dirk murmurs, his voice choked thick and wet. Dave shakes his head, crawling over his boy and practically curling up around him, nose buried in his hair. It’s so long, now. He smells like salt from the ocean, sweat, that metallic, coppery tang of blood. It coats the inside of his noise, his tongue, and Dave has to squeeze his eyes shut.

“It’s not your fault.” And that’s all he can say, over and over. It’s not. It _isn’t_. It isn’t fair, that Dirk has to be the one to die. That he’s going to lose his brother, his entire world. He’s lived without him before, but he doesn’t want to, again. He doesn’t know if he can.

“I knew, ever since I started coughing.” His boy’s still speaking, and Dave soaks up every word, memorizes each little shift in tone. He resists the urge to grab Dirk’s hand and squeeze. “I didn’t think it would take this long. I- I was ready for it, before.”

Dirk doesn’t say it, but it hangs in the air between them, an albatross on both their necks: _I don’t want to die._ And Dave’s answer lingers in the spaces between their breaths: _It’s not fair that you have to_.

“I shouldn’t have-,”

“Don’t.” It’s barely a whisper, but Dave’s words wither and die in his throat. “It doesn’t matter, now.”

Dave wants to say that it does, it has to. But as much as he wishes, he can’t change the past. And god, he wishes. That Dave hadn’t appreciated his brother like he should have. Hadn’t cared for him enough, hadn’t stayed with him, when it mattered. He’d forgotten about Dirk, and that is what festers at the core of him, the regret that gnaws away at him now that his boy is here, very much a real presence in his life.

But Dirk opens his arms slightly, and Dave folds himself into them and when the boy presses a damp kiss to his forehead, it feels like benediction, like absolution. Like a crucifixion.

\--

They stay inside, for the rest of that day. Dirk doesn’t talk much, but Dave rattles on to fill the silence, and his brother, his boy, listens. He makes quiet noises of affirmation, and Dave even manages to startle a laugh out of him, hoarse and broken as it may be. It still counts. He gets Dirk to eat- canned peaches, a treat they’ve both been saving. Dirk’s mouth gleams wet in the low light as dusk starts to set in, but he shakes his head when Dave asks if he wants a fire. For light and warmth.

Dave accepts it, reluctantly. He’ll light one later, of this he’s sure. But in the dark, Dirk moves over to slot in against his side, a perfect fit as always. He loops an arm around his boy to hold him close, lets Dirk rest his head against Dave’s shoulder like it’s comfortable in any way, and pretends to ignore the coughing that seems to wrack his body every few minutes. It’s worse, now. So much worse.

He opens his mouth a few times, tries to find more to say. But it’s like he’s run dry, the nervous chatter that had come to him so easily in the wan light of the day drying up and fading away as the sky darkened. The boy, for once, seems discomfited by the silence. Each suppressed cough seems magnified in it, along with the labored, wet sound of his breathing.

Dave just rubs small circles into the boy’s back, ignoring how he can feel the grooves of his ribs, the too-sharp notches of his spine. He’s become good at that by now.

“I’m glad we made it,” the boy finally rasps out, once the darkness has settled over the world like a thick curtain. His voice is hoarse, half-choked, and Dave is torn between telling him to be quiet, spare himself the effort, and begging him to say more. He wants to have the chance to commit his voice to memory- and, well, what would Dirk be saving it for? His arm tightens around the body that feels too small and too fragile to be so important.

“Yeah? It’s not like there was much else to go to,” Dave answers, quiet. “There were rumors, you know. Of boats that were on the coasts that’d take people off and away. That was when all this shit started, though.”

“Why didn’t you get on one?” the boy asks, and Dave slants a glance at him. His eyes are half-closed, now, his skin dangerously warm.

“Dunno. I didn’t think this would happen. I didn’t think things would have turned out this bad,” Dave finally says. He wishes he could give an answer that said it was because he didn’t want to leave Dirk, because he wanted to go back and find his brother and take care of him and make sure they got there together. Like what would have happened in a movie, or a story. One with a happy ending. But the truth that rots at his core and eats away at his heart, that chokes him with guilt when the boy doubles over coughing or when he sees the boy’s scars, is simple. He gave up on his brother, and that’s all there is.

“Do you think they were, y’know. Real?” the boy asks. It’s harder to understand him, now, the words a little slurred. Dave nudges him, a little more harshly than needed. The boy’s eyes jolt open again.

“Real?”

“Yeah. I’m sure they charged a whole lot of cash and all that, ‘cause I guess back then people thought it would still get better. That money would still be worth something. But do you think that they ever actually got out? Or if things ended up like they did on land, but worse.”

“…I want to think that they got out.”

“But if they didn’t.”

“Some must have. The whole world can’t be like this.”

“Says who?”

“Says common sense. Whatever happened wouldn’t drastically affect somewhere on the other side of the world.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why didn’t anyone come help us?”

This, Dave cannot answer. Maybe they did try. Maybe some of those boats sent over were from those places, maybe the people that got on them were able to go on and live their lives. Maybe the flash had a different aftermath there, but something easier. A life that could be built up again, instead of abandoned entirely.

He doesn’t want to think that everything, everywhere, is like this. It can’t be.

“Exactly,” the boy says, with a finality that’s far too old for him. “But maybe that’s alright. Maybe we deserved it. Everything was going to shit, anyway.”

“ _Dirk_ ,” Dave bites out, his eyes wide. “We didn’t deserve this. None of the thousands- hell, it’s probably closer to millions- of people who died because of this _deserved_ it. That’s a fucking shitty thing to say.”

“Doesn’t make it any less true, though. And maybe we didn’t deserve it then. But we sure as hell do now.” There’s a bitterness in his voice, and those slim fingers curl tight into fists, protruding knuckles whitening. Dave reaches over, smooths his thumb along the ridges and dips of them.

“Maybe some of those guys out there do. The ones who’re using survival as an excuse to do whatever the fuck they want. But they were monsters Before, and they’re monsters now, and nothing was going to change that. Doesn’t mean that regular people deserved it. Doesn’t mean that the good guys, guys like us, deserved it.” It doesn’t mean you deserve it, he almost says, but just the thought cuts him to the quick. You don’t deserve this.

The boy doesn’t say anything in response- he can’t. He’s bent over, his head hanging just above his knees as his shoulders shake, coughs rattling his chest. Dave looks away, but his hand tightens over Dirk’s. It’s shaking.

“Talk to me about something else,” he says, when the fit’s passed for now. “Tell me about Before.”

“You lived it, too. What’s there to tell?” Dave narrows his eyes, unsure if he’s imagining the petulance in his boy’s voice. Surely, he’s not.

“I know what I thought about it. I want to know what you did,” is what he settles on saying. What he doesn’t say that it’s his last chance to know how Dirk had really felt, back then. What he’d thought. What he’d wished for and wanted to happen but didn’t. The bare truth of it.

(Even if part of him knows that he won’t like what he hears, even if it wants Dirk to lie and say that everything was fine and perfect like he sometimes thinks it was- when there was food and sunlight and laughter, and gleaming cities and dreams coming true.)

“No, you don’t.” Dirk’s shaking his head, and his face- he looks torn, and guilty, and Dave doesn’t understand why. “You want to know what I thought about _you_. You won’t like what you hear.”

There it is. Dave’s heart pounds a sick beat in his chest, and he swallows around the knot that rises in his throat. The cumulative guilt that he’s been carrying around ever since he set eyes on his boy, all those months ago. Months. Too short a time, really, when he thinks about all those years he had him. All the years they were apart. He wishes they had more time, fuck; they _deserve_ more time. More time for him to get to know every single part of his brother, to be able to properly shake him out of those nightmares. Enough for his boy to know why Dave keeps his shitty sword around even though it’s broken and why he can’t really bear to touch the gun for longer than he has to.

“But I think you need to say it.”

“Do I?”

“Yeah.”

“A deathbed confession, then. Famous last words. You gonna write them down, bro?”

“You’re not-,” Dave starts, and cuts himself off. He is. _He is_.

“Doesn’t matter,” the boy continues, choking out the words. There’s a delirious, sick smile on his face as his stained-red lips contort around a cough. Dave knows that if the light was better, he’d see the fine mist of blood sprayed from his mouth. “Nobody’s here to read them. Nobody’s here to care.”

“I am,” he says, and he curls his hand tight around the boy’s. See me. I’m here, now, I’ve been here. Look at me, Dirk. But despite all that, despite the way the boy’s fingers lace loosely with his, he doesn’t look at Dave. “I’m right here,” he says again, more forcefully.

Dirk turns, this time, and his gaze is far more haunted than it should be. All he does is nod, and slowly close his eyes. Words to wake him up fly to the tip of Dave’s tongue like arrows notched on a bow, but he’s opening his eyes again soon after, loosing a long, rattling breath.

“But you weren’t always. I thought you’d leave. In the beginning. I don’t know what made me lead you back. I hadn’t made up my mind about it. But you followed me anyway. You were there. I still didn’t know what to think.”  

Dave remains quiet. These words are Dirk’s to say- and Dave thinks that he needs to say them, before it’s too late. Thinks that maybe he’s been needing to say them for too long, from since Before, only he never got the chance then.

(He was never given the chance, then, something in him hisses. A thousand started conversations, brushed off with “not now, kid”, “Sorry, bro, I gotta go, you know how it is”, “Can’t talk, I’m running late.” He doesn’t even remember when Dirk stopped trying. He should, but he doesn’t. All he remembers, now that he’s letting himself see how things really were, is text messages that petered off over time. An apartment full of silence when he got back. A boy curled up on the couch in the middle of the night, the TV still on. One he’d stopped tucking in, in favour of stumbling over to his own bed. Dirk had stopped waiting up, hadn’t he? Or had Dave stopped checking?)

“And then. You cared, when I was gone. You _hugged_ me. I didn’t know why. I hated you a little for it.” That sentence is whispered, low, like it’s being torn from his throat. Dave just holds his hand tighter, and he has to close his eyes, take a breath.

“You gave me food, too. During the storm. And you were smiling after. I forgot what it looked like. It made me think that maybe I’d be okay.”

“What?” Dave can’t help the interruption, then. “What do you mean, it made you think that you’d be okay? You weren’t- you weren’t sick then. You were fine.”

The boy shakes his head, slow and mournful. “Been coughing since before you showed up. Wasn’t as bad, before. Easy to ignore. But nothing I could fix. Nothing you could fix, either.”

“That’s- that’s why you didn’t want to leave?”

“Yeah.”

No. If he hadn’t left- no, if Dave hadn’t made the both of them leave, they’d have had more time. He knows it, now. They could have stayed in the cave. It’d have been warm, they’d have had shelter. The food situation wouldn’t have been good, but. Dave would have taken trips out, they could have managed. There’s a sinking feeling in his chest, now, the hole cut there by the sudden realization of loss no longer crisp and clean, but ragged with edges that drag him down like an anchor to the nothingness at the ocean floor.

He’s killed his boy, surely as he would have by putting a bullet in his head.

“Dunno if I’d have lasted longer, though.”

“You would have,” Dave says, hoarsely. Fiercely. He has to drop the boy’s hand, guilt burning like a fire at just that simple touch. He doesn’t deserve it, he’s never deserved it. Just when he thought that maybe he could make things right, that maybe he’s _been_ making things right.

The boy just looks at him, his eyes too old and too sad. They’re rimmed in red, and Dave realizes with a shock that he’s been crying. His cheeks are wet, and it’s instinct to reach over and gently smooth a thumb over each one, drying them. Dirk lets him, even though Dave has to look away because he can’t meet his eyes.

He can’t think about them closing and never opening again, that last bit of the sun they have left going dark forever. He takes a deep breath and slowly exhales, the air whistling out from between his lips. The sound is lost as Dirk doubles over in another fit of coughing. Wordlessly, Dave picks up a tiny bit of cloth, the corner of a now-bloodstained blanket, and offers it to Dirk to wipe off the sticky crimson liquid covering his mouth. It goes untouched in his hand.

Please, he begs silently. This is something he can do. Maybe he says it aloud, too, because the boy takes it, wipes carefully at his lips. Fastidious as always.

“I didn’t want to be a burden,” he continues. Dave doesn’t know how he can say those things and sound so detached, how he can say those things and even believe them. He wants to tell his boy that he’s never been a burden, that every single sacrifice Dave had made when he was younger was worth it.

(But then, he hasn’t exactly made many sacrifices now, has he?)

“I didn’t want something like this to happen.”

“If I hadn’t showed up,” Dave says, slowly, when the boy doesn’t look like he’s going to continue on that train of thought. “What would you…?”

He can’t bring himself to put that thought into words, and as soon as he asks the question, he regrets it. He knows the answer. Of course he does.

“The gun only has one bullet.”

Christ.

There’s nothing he can really say to that. His mouth dry and his heart pounding a sick beat, Dave lets his eyes close for just a minute.

The boy’s words hang in the air between them, stifling. Dave’s hand is still cradling his cheek, he can feel the bone through thin skin. His thumb strokes again over where can remember there being a smattering of freckles, even though they’ve faded with years of a hidden sun.

He lets his hand drop to the blanket, and forces himself to reopen his eyes. He’ll bear witness to this, to his boy’s final moments. Because he knows that’s what this is. Just like he knows that when he wakes up, the sun will still be gone. Just like he knows that the sea will still be there, roaring and uncaring, and that’s where he’ll put his boy’s body so nobody can get to it. Just like he knows that when Dirk closes his eyes tonight, he won’t open them in the morning.

Dave can’t speak around the knot in his throat, and tears sting at his eyes as he squeezes them shut. Wills them not to fall. Bony fingers curl around his hand and squeeze lightly- that’s all he can do now, isn’t it? It feels like the grasp of a skeleton. It’s all he can do not to yank his hand away, like that could refute the truth that he can’t deny anymore, no matter how much he wants to pretend otherwise.

“I don’t know why you stayed.” Somehow, the boy is still talking, even if the words are gritted out and near-incoherent through held-in coughs. He finds the will to squeeze his hand back. A small comfort, but the best he can offer. It’s not enough, it’s never been enough.

“It was you,” Dave says, because that’s something that needs answering. “I had to.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Dirk.”

“You left me. So many times. You hated me.”

“I didn’t. I couldn’t.”

“I was a reminder of-,” a minute before he can continue, his voice rough, “of what you wanted to leave behind. You were trying to leave me behind.”

“I-,”

“If I’d left then, you wouldn’t have noticed.”

Dave wants to say that he would have. But the person he was Before is as much of a stranger to him as the boy was when they met again.

“You wouldn’t have cared. You left me when it happened. You didn’t come back.”

The cities were dangerous, so dangerous, back then. Dave can picture it now, and it makes him sick. His boy, hoarding food and barricading himself in an apartment, waiting for someone who would never come back. Holding out as long as possible before leaving. Not with the boats, not after the first or second or even third wave of looters. After all that. When the bodies had started clogging the streets. Dave doesn’t know how he got out of there alive. He knows Dirk didn’t get out unscathed.

“You’d already forgotten about me by then.”

It’s not the words that sting so much as how casually the boy says them. The sun is gone. The nights are cold. The road winds on. Dave forgot him. Just another fact of life, just another unfortunate truth in this miserable existence they’ve been consigned to. Dave thinks that it would hurt less if it weren’t true, if he could say that he’d never stopped looking, that he’d waited at the Lalondes’ because he thought that Dirk would eventually find his way there. That he hadn’t taken those boats because he was waiting for Dirk, too.

He can even picture himself saying it, he can feel the lies tumble to the tip of his tongue, only to slam against closed lips. He’d tell Dirk all of that, say that he’d left the Lalonde place earlier and willingly, taking what they’d left behind for him (that, at least, would be a truth. They’d left when they’d known that it wasn’t going to get better, and Dave likes to think that they made it onto a boat, that they made it out and to someplace better). He’d tell the boy of his determination to get back to LA, walking, hitchhiking because people were still people then, because they’d had gas and because there were enough others on the road so that walking wasn’t dangerous. Except when it was, except when the roads were clogged with bodies and cars and impassable. He could say that’s why he took so long to get to LA to begin with. He could say that when he finally got there, he didn’t find anything- the apartment would have been gutted and picked clean by then, it would be a safe thing to say. He could say that he got captured after and this wouldn’t even be a lie, even though it didn’t happen anywhere near Los Angeles. He could say that he survived, that he got out and laid low and wandered because he had nowhere to go and nothing to live for. This, too, would be the truth.

He can even see how the boy’s face, so tired and pale and solemn, would light up at those words. Contort in sympathy. He can feel the feather-light kiss his boy would brush against his forehead, as if to tell him that it was okay, because he found him, because they’re here together.

He so badly wants that.

“I’m sorry.” Dave says, instead. His inadequacy as a parent gapes between them like a chasm.

“I know.”

The moment is an open wound, still raw and bleeding.

“I’m dying, though. Might as well forgive you for it.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“Self-flagellation suits no one.”

“You think I deserve it?” _You think that I deserve you?_ Dave can’t fathom a world in which this is true.

The boy is silent.

“I think I should.” And so he does. It’s that simple, the final dissolution of the distance between them. It feels like exhaling.

\--

Dave had fallen asleep sometime in the course of the night. The body that lays next to his is stiff and cold, and so, so still. He holds it close anyway, tries to imagine that the boy is just asleep. But he can’t.

He packs up their things, ready to go. Wraps the body in that same blanket, even as the part of him that’s clawing its way back to the forefront of his mind tells him it’s a waste. He ignores it. Dave knows that he wouldn’t be able to use it again.

He tries to wipe the blood off its mouth, but it’s dried on, caked in. He closes the eyes, dull orange and staring wide. He doesn’t think about how his boy might have choked to death on his own blood, while Dave slept beside him.

Dave carries the corpse in his arms, wades out in the water until he’s waist deep. There are rocks wrapped there with it, to weigh it down. Fist-sized, most of them, scavenged from the base of the crumbling boulders that jut out towards the sea. He hopes it’ll be enough. He can't bear the thought of what's left of Dirk washing up to shore for his bones to be picked clean by the monsters he spent so much time trying to avoid.

He has to force his arms to let go, some instinct still urging him to hold on. To hold his boy close and never let him go again. But he’s already gone, and Dave is holding on to all that's left.

(He remembers snippets of old stories from Before: A man standing in the grave of his beloved and clutching brittle bones of a woman long dead to his chest; a prince holding a corpse close because he couldn't let go and welcoming death when it came for him. He wonders if those fictional figures could even come close to understanding- they never lost a brother, twice.)

Dave allows himself one more moment, and he presses a kiss to where the lump of the boy’s head is. He’s covered the face- he can’t bear to look at it. His eyes sting, and the blanket grows wet beneath his face.

He lets go. Pushes that bundle down and out where the current will take it to a place that’s maybe safer. His tears are dry by the time he wades back to shore, staring at the place where he once stood.

There are still supplies waiting for him. Blankets. Clothes that won’t fit. A sword with its blade carefully sharpened, and the gun, still in his holster. His body makes him take the food and both packs, but he leaves the clothes behind. He keeps the sword, too. The gun, he straps to his belt. A single bullet left.

He’s gone, and the road still looms behind.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> A Loose Timeline: Dave meets him in August, they leave in late October/beginning of November. They reach the sea the following March-April, probably.


End file.
